Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary who is leading trade talks with China this week, said Wednesday in an interview on Fox News that the United States and China had agreed to extend a trade truce for two more months past a November deadline.
The truce was struck in South Korea last year after President Trump imposed steep tariffs on Chinese exports and the United States and China became embroiled in a tit-for-tat trade war. The truce has involved the United States’ suspending certain tariffs and other restrictions on the Chinese economy, and China’s agreeing to provide a steady flow of rare earth minerals needed by U.S. factories making cars, semiconductors, planes, power tools and other products.
The agreement will be extended until Jan. 10, Mr. Bessent said, “to give us more time to see what we can do on the economic front.”
Mr. Bessent gave the interview around the same time that Mr. Trump was greeting the Chinese leader Xi Jinping with a lavish ceremony at an air base outside Washington for the start of a multiday state visit.
The visit will include another welcome ceremony with an honor guard at the White House, a meeting between the two presidents, a state dinner and a tour of the National Archives. It may be the second of as many as four in-person meetings that the two leaders will host this year, Mr. Bessent said.
The Treasury secretary said he met again today with He Lifeng, the Chinese vice premier, whom he had also met with on Sunday, “to see if we could do a bigger deal.” Mr. Bessent said that the two sides were working to reduce tariffs on $30 billion of imports from each country, and that the countries would probably also make announcements relating to financial services and agricultural purchases.
Mr. Bessent admitted that China was “behind schedule” on some agricultural purchases, and he said the United States was encouraging the country to increase those.
Asked if China would agree to a new notification system for national security issues related to artificial intelligence that Mr. Bessent announced last weekend, he said he believed that they would and that China was “very eager” to engage with the United States on A.I.
The United States is working with China to define the most important A.I. risks, including uncontrolled A.I. agents and nonstate actors using A.I. to carry out cyberattacks or create biological weapons, Mr. Bessent added. He said he hoped that the United States and China “would be able to talk about any incidents that have occurred, especially any that have crossed national borders.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
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