SEOUL, South Korea — President Trump said he has secured trade deals with China after meeting Thursday with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a high-stakes summit aimed at reducing tensions between the world’s two largest economies.
Onboard Air Force One, Mr. Trump told reporters that he will reduce tariffs against Chinese goods by 10% — to 47% — in exchange for Beijing tightening regulations on fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid cited as a main contributor to the U.S. drug crisis.
The president also said China will “purchase massive amounts of soybeans, sorghum and other farm products” and provide access to rare earth minerals, which are critical in the production of various technologies. He also said talks were underway on the export of more advanced U.S. semiconductors to China.
“I guess on the scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the best, I would say the meeting was a 12,” Mr. Trump told reporters, adding that he expects a fully inclusive trade deal to be signed “pretty soon.”
Mr. Xi said the agreements outlined at the summit would provide “peace of mind” for the world, but he was less sanguine than Mr. Trump.
“Both sides should take the long-term perspective into account, focusing on the benefits of cooperation rather than falling into a vicious cycle of mutual retaliation,” the Chinese president said, according to media reports.
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Thursday’s meeting — the first between the two leaders during Mr. Trump’s second term — took place on the sidelines of the 2025 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit and marked the climax of the president’s five-day Asian tour.
The U.S.-China agreements had been negotiated in depth, in advance. But with no actual deal yet signed, it is still too early to say if the Trump-Xi summit will live up to its promise.
State news agency Xinhua reported Mr. Xi saying that bilateral economic relations “have experienced ups and downs recently and this has also given the two sides some insights,” but the “business relationship should continue to serve as the anchor and driving force for China-U.S. relations, not a stumbling block.”
Elsewhere, it was made clear that there is no real change on the strategic front.
Speaking in Malaysia, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told The Washington Times that, despite media attention on U.S. anti-drug strikes near South America, Chinese forces remain America’s primary military rival.
“Just because you recognize the need to focus on our own hemisphere does not mean we’re distracted from the pacing threat and the reality of what deterring China really means,” Mr. Hegseth told The Times.
Summit success
The APEC summit represents “the momentous occasion in 1,300 years since the unification of the Three Kingdoms,” Lee Cheol-woo, governor of North Gyeongsang Province, where the event was being held this week, said in an interview.
The host city of Gyeongju, was the capital of the Silla Dynasty, which unified the Korean Peninsula after overcoming two other kingdoms during Korea’s heroic age. Though Thursday’s bilateral was not an official part of APEC’s multilateral events, Mr. Lee made clear its import.
“The participation of the two leaders will determine the success or failure of the APEC Summit,” he told the Dong-A newspaper last week.
Foreign policy experts say that the agreements between the U.S. and China may offer them — and the world — breathing room from the retaliatory trade measures that have marked Mr. Trump’s second term.
However, given the breadth of the peer-peer competition — ideological, geopolitical, economic, technological — U.S.-China tensions are unlikely to evaporate long-term.
Mr. Trump’s first-term export restrictions on semiconductor chips to China were the first major U.S. economic strike against the country, a strategy the Biden administration continued.
But the policy has been a double-edged sword.
China remains unable to fabricate the most advanced chip sets, due to the U.S. control over intellectual property in the machinery used for their manufacture. However, U.S. firms have lost market share in China, the world’s biggest market for chips — a point recently made, vocally, by Nvidia.
Meanwhile, China’s Commerce Ministry agreed to relax “implementation of relevant export control measures” on rare earths, which are critical components in defense, transportation, computing and telecommunications.
Though the materials are not especially rare, their extraction and processing is harsh on the environment. That is a key reason why so many advanced economies gave up on the sector, leaving China to command the global market.
And China’s agreement to buy U.S. agricultural products should ease pressure on Mr. Trump from U.S. farmers who saw sales dry up as they became collateral damage in the bilateral trade strife.
’A temporary blip’
Nations regionally and globally have been facing pressure to get behind one side or the other. Those pressures are particularly stark for regional democracies Japan and South Korea, which — though militarily allied to Washington — are deeply embedded in the global supply chain with communist China.
There had been widespread hope that the Trump-Xi sit-down would provide a template for a relational reset for the remainder of Mr. Trump’s term in office.
Momentum may continue. Mr. Trump told reporters he expects to visit Mr. Xi in China next April and hopes his counterpart will visit the U.S. thereafter.
But with Beijing and Washington having found each other’s pressure points, and with the two still competing for primacy and influence across multiple domains, it is unclear whether today’s reset will gain long-term traction.
“I think it is very much a temporary blip, as we have seen how volatile things can get on the bilateral front,” said Alex Neill, a Singapore-based expert on China’s military and strategic postures. “Given the nature of the White House incumbent’s approach to international relations, and China’s sort of quid pro quo approach, it is impossible to know in two years’ time what state relations will be in.”
Mr. Xi could use a breather, given domestic pressures.
He continues to purge the top tier of his military ranks — though whether this is weakening his forces or strengthening them by ensuring up-and-coming Xi loyalists take command roles, is disputed.
Massive over-investment in multiple sectors, most notably real estate, continues to affect China’s macro economy, which has performed sub-par since the COVID-19 crisis.
However, Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities — notably the powerful farmers’ lobby, and multiple U.S. industries which depend heavily upon Chinese upstream products, such as rare earths, as well as their access to the overall Chinese market — are also in plain sight.
These factors argued for today’s apparent win-win.
“This is the most important bilateral relationship in the world and they have to live with one another, so if [talks] make both of them look good, and they are willing to walk away with some concessions — why not?” said Mr. Neill, a fellow at the think tank Pacific Forum. “But this is a short-term de-escalation not a far-reaching panacea for the core, contentious elements of their relationship.”
• Bill Gertz contributed to this story.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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