Top U.S. officials said Monday that America and China will both substantially cut reciprocal tariffs targeting each other.
The announcement goes some way toward deescalating U.S. President Donald Trump’s huge tariff war that has upended global trade and caused economic aftershocks around the world.
The U.S. will cut tariffs on Chinese imports from 145 percent to 30 percent, while the Chinese side will drop measures from 125 percent to 10 percent.
“We have a mechanism for continued talks,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at a press conference after U.S.-China talks in Geneva over the weekend.
He added: “We want more balanced trade. And I think that both sides are committed to achieving that. We would like to see, China open to more U.S. goods. We expect that as a negotiation to proceed.”
Trump has long had a bugbear with what he sees as unfair trading practices by countries and blocs around the world, often singling out the European Union, which he says is “screwing” the U.S., and China, which he clobbered with massive tariffs in early April.
Beijing hit back at those measures immediately, as the sides raised tit-for-tat tariffs on each other to levels that shut down most trade between the U.S. and China.
“China was the only country that chose to implement retaliation against the United States. All other countries withheld and decided that they wanted to negotiate with United State or simply and not retaliate,” said U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. “So we’ve been in a detailed discussion with other countries for several weeks at this point.”
He added: “Both sides represented their national interests well, but we also concluded that we had shared interests and that neither side was interested in a decoupling.”
This story is being updated.
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