The Trump administration is proposing a new, more formal approach to monitoring and adjusting trade between the United States and China, as it tries to rebalance an economic relationship U.S. officials have long criticized as unequal.
Following a meeting with their Chinese counterparts in Paris, Trump administration officials said on Monday that the governments had discussed creating a “U.S.-China Board of Trade” as part of a planned upcoming meeting between President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping.
Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, said the approach would be a way to formalize and identify “what kinds of things should we be importing from China, what kinds of things should we be exporting to China, to really make sure that we can focus on areas of mutual benefit.”
“That’s what we expect for leaders to be talking about when they meet,” Mr. Greer said of Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi.
Mr. Greer and Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, conducted talks with their Chinese counterparts on Sunday and Monday in Paris in preparation for that meeting. Mr. Trump had been expected to travel to China in late March. But in recent days he and his advisers have suggested the trip could be postponed as the president deals with the U.S. war in Iran.
U.S. and Chinese advisers are still preparing for a meeting between their leaders, though some have criticized America’s lack of preparation.
In their meetings in Paris, American and Chinese officials appeared to have made progress to nail down commitments for China to buy more agricultural products, energy and planes from the United States, said Wendy Cutler, a senior vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute and a former U.S. trade negotiator.
Ms. Cutler said that the Board of Trade could focus on identifying opportunities for expanding trade in less sensitive types of products, and perhaps even discuss reducing tariffs on those goods.
Chad Bown, an analyst at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former official with the Biden administration, said that it made sense to find ways to manage U.S.-China trade, given that past attempts to convince China to overhaul its trade practices had not been particularly successful.
But Mr. Bown said managing trade was easier in theory than in practice. While the United States might convince state-owned Chinese firms to purchase more American soybeans, oil or airplanes, he said, it would be difficult to persuade Chinese consumers to buy manufactured goods like cars, which the United States is the most eager to sell.
The world had never before seen an attempt to manage trade at this scale, Mr. Bown said. “If the U.S. government wants to do this seriously, it really has to do its homework,” he added.
Mr. Greer has spoken publicly and privately about his preference that the government take a heavier hand in international commerce. In an interview in January, Mr. Greer said that he supported the idea of managed trade, and that the United States had a long history of managing trade before the end of the Cold War.
“The more balanced and reciprocal a trading relationship is with a partner, the less managed it has to be,” Mr. Greer said, adding, “but we’re not really there yet.”
Some corporate executives have expressed concern about the administration’s attempt to manage trade with China. They have questioned the types of exports and imports the United States plans to encourage, and whether certain industries that are not promoted could suffer.
Much remains unclear about the so-called Board of Trade, including if it would cover so-called rare earth minerals, which are critical to a variety of U.S. factories. In response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs, China began clamping down on exports of those minerals last year.
Mr. Trump and his advisers have in the past denounced the type of economic dialogues most administrations carried out with Chinese officials as a waste of time. And past attempts by the Trump administration and others to manage trade with China have also fallen short of the governments’ goals.
China failed to meet ambitious targets for purchases that were included in the trade deal it struck with Mr. Trump in his first term. Over the past year, Chinese officials have also dragged their feet with planned purchases of U.S. soybeans, leading to a sharp drop in soybean exports.
The trade ties that the United States has with China are one of the world’s most complex and important economic relationships.
The United States depends on Chinese factories for an array of products, including strategic goods, but it has accused the Chinese government of using a variety of unfair trade practices in the past to boost its exports, like subsidizing industries, adopting lax environmental regulations and manipulating its currency.
The United States has run a trade deficit with China for roughly 40 years, and the gap between what it imports from China and what it exports to it exploded in the 2000s, after China joined the World Trade Organization.
But over the past year, U.S.-China economic ties have changed drastically. As Mr. Trump amped up tariffs on China, firms — American, multinational and Chinese — began looking for factories elsewhere.
U.S. exports to China and U.S. imports from China both fell by more than 25 percent in 2025, Mr. Bown said. But while the U.S. trade deficit with China fell sharply, trade deficits with other countries like Vietnam, Mexico and Taiwan rose.
The Trump administration is now working on a raft of new tariffs on exports from foreign countries, including China. Those levies would replace the tariffs that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down last month.
In a news conference on Thursday, Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that China opposed unilateral tariffs and called the move “pretext for political manipulation.”
Mark Landler contributed reporting from Paris and Alan Rappeport from Washington.
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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