The United States and China, trying to ease economic tensions between the superpowers, agreed to a “framework” for extending a trade truce that the world’s two largest economies reached last month, officials from both countries said on Tuesday.
After two days of marathon negotiations in London, top economic officials from the United States and China are now expected to present the new framework to their leaders, President Trump and President Xi Jinping, for final approval.
The agreement, the full details of which were not immediately released, is intended to solidify terms of a deal that the United States and China reached in Switzerland in May that unraveled in recent weeks. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was part of the negotiating team, said that American concerns over China’s restrictions on exports of rare earth minerals and magnets had been resolved.
“We have reached a framework to implement the Geneva consensus,” Mr. Lutnick told reporters in London, describing the agreement as a “handshake.”
He added that Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi would be briefed on the agreement before it took effect.
“They were focused on trying to deliver on what President Xi told President Trump,” Mr. Lutnick said. “I think both sides had extra impetus to get things done.”
The U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer, who took part in the discussions, said they were also focused on ensuring compliance with what was agreed to in Geneva about rare earth mineral exports and tariffs. He said the two sides would remain in regular contact as they tried to work through their economic disagreements.
The 90-day pause on some tariffs that was reached in Geneva is scheduled to expire in August. Mr. Greer said it would be up to Mr. Trump to decide if that would be extended as additional negotiations proceeded.
China’s official Xinhua news agency issued a cautious statement, saying the two sides had agreed “in principle” — a term used by state media and diplomats to indicate that details have not been worked out. According to Xinhua, the discussions were “professional, rational, in-depth and candid.” Chinese state media often uses the term “candid” when there have been considerable disagreements.
The countries made the announcement shortly before the Trump administration attained an early yet important win in a fight over the legality of its tariffs.
In Washington, a federal appeals court agreed on Tuesday to allow Mr. Trump to maintain many of those import duties, which a lower court declared to be illegal in late May. The stay will preserve the centerpiece of the president’s trade agenda while federal lawyers battle with states and businesses that say they were harmed by tariffs that Mr. Trump had no authority to issue.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who had led the American delegation, departed the talks late Tuesday to return to Washington for congressional hearings on Wednesday. On the Chinese side, the negotiations were led by He Lifeng, the vice premier in charge of economic policy.
The two sides were seeking a resolution to painful economic measures they had imposed on each other in recent months. After Mr. Trump ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese goods in April, Beijing clamped down on exports of critical minerals and magnets, threatening to shut down operations by American manufacturers, defense contractors and others.
In a meeting in Geneva last month, U.S. and Chinese officials agreed to roll back tariffs and other retaliatory measures. But Trump administration officials were dismayed when Chinese shipments of the rare earth minerals, and the magnets made with them, remained infrequent, and they accused China of violating its agreement in Geneva.
U.S. officials responded by clamping down on exports of American products and technology to China, including software for making semiconductors, gases like ethane and butane, and nuclear and aerospace components. U.S. officials also proposed barring Chinese students from enrolling in the United States.
The Chinese government denied that its rare earth measures were targeted at the United States, and said American officials were the ones who had broken the agreement made in Geneva.
American dependence on China for rare earth metals and rare earth magnets has given Beijing a formidable tool to put pressure on the American economy by suddenly cutting off many of these supplies since early April. The United States has a single rare earth mine in Mountain Pass, Calif., and has very little capacity to process rare earths into needed chemicals and then into magnets.
It remains unclear whether the latest framework will hold, and analysts were skeptical that a broader pact was imminent.
“Two days of negotiations are better than none, but frankly, we’ve seen these extended negotiations in the past,” Henrietta Treyz, director of economic policy at Veda Partners, wrote in a research note. “There’s a lot of time spent translating, confirming meaning and reiterating framing that goes on in these negotiations that make them time consuming but ultimately keep a lot of the status quo, which appears to be what’s come out of London.”
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Beijing, and Tony Romm from Washington.
Alan Rappeport is an economic policy reporter for The Times, based in Washington. He covers the Treasury Department and writes about taxes, trade and fiscal matters.
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.
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