United States President Donald Trump has said he will visit China early next year after receiving an invitation from Beijing.
“I’ve been invited to go to China, and I’ll be doing that sometime fairly early next year. We have it sort of set,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday.
The US president also said he expected to meet in South Korea with China’s President Xi Jinping to seal a “fair” trade deal later this month despite a recent row over tariffs.
Only last week, a return to an all-out trade war appeared imminent after China announced new curbs on its rare earths exports, and Trump threatened to raise tariffs on Chinese goods to 100 percent.
Relations were so bad that US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent accused China of pointing “a bazooka at the supply chains and the industrial base of the entire free world”.
Speaking on Monday, Trump appeared to put recent strife behind the pair, saying that the two countries needed to thrive together.
He said that he wanted China to buy US soya beans, an export that has been hit especially hard by the trade war, cutting Midwestern farmers off from their biggest market.
Chicago Board of Trade soybean futures hit their highest level in a month after Trump’s comments raised hopes that China would start buying the crop again.
He went on to express confidence in his relationship with counterpart Xi, contradicting an earlier Pentagon assessment that China was planning to seize Taiwan in 2027.
“I think we’ll be just fine with China. China doesn’t want to do that,” he told reporters as he met Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
While Trump conceded that China had designs on Taiwan, describing it as the apple of Xi’s eye, he said the country would be deterred from invading, given its awareness that the US “is the strongest military power in the world by far”.
“We have the best of everything, and nobody’s going to mess with that,” Trump said.
He declined to answer a question on whether he would sacrifice US support for Taiwan as part of an agreement with Xi.
Back in June, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had called China a “threat to the region” at the high-profile Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs hit back. “The US should not entertain illusions about using the Taiwan question as a bargaining chip to contain China, nor should it play with fire,” it said.
‘Hostile threats’
China has long claimed self-governing Taiwan, which split off from the mainland during a civil war that brought the Communist Party to power in 1949, as its territory and has not ruled out the use of force to bring the island under its control.
The Chinese military regularly sends fighter jets and warships into the skies and waters off Taiwan and has staged major military exercises in the area in recent years.
The US, like most countries in the world, does not recognise Taiwan as a country, but remains the most important international backer of the flourishing democracy and technology hub.
Under US law, Washington is required to provide Taiwan with weapons for its self-defence. But the US has often been ambiguous on whether it would use force to defend Taiwan.
Trump’s predecessor, former US President Joe Biden, repeatedly suggested he would order the US military to intervene if China moved on Taiwan.
Earlier this month, Taiwan’s President William Lai Ching-te pledged to build a dome-like air defence system to guard against “hostile threats” and increased defence spending.
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