WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday that President Trump’s planned meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping is back on — after Trump threatened 100% additional tariffs Friday and said there “seems to be no reason” for a scheduled Oct. 29 summit.
“He will be meeting with party chair Xi in Korea — I believe that meeting will still be on,” Bessent told Fox Business in an interview after Beijing sought to blunt blowback to its new export controls.
Bessent helped broker a May cease-fire in the US-China trade war and said there was “substantial communication” over the weekend — after the Chinese government announced rules Thursday requiring companies to get permission to export products with rare-earth and critical minerals like batteries, magnets and computer chips to power artificial intelligence (AI) products.
Trump sought to thaw tensions some with China on Sunday, saying Xi “doesn’t want Depression for his country, and neither do I. The U.S.A. wants to help China, not hurt it!!!”
“Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine! Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment,” he also claimed in a Truth Social post.
The Chinese Commerce Ministry said Sunday that the new rules are not intended as export bans and that there may be flexibility in enforcement, including “license exemptions to effectively promote legitimate trade.”
“This is China versus the world — they have pointed a bazooka at the supply chains and the industrial base of the entire free world, and we’re not going to have it,” Bessent said on Fox Business. “A group of bureaucrats in China cannot tell us and our allies how to run our supply system.”
Major US stock market indices were up Monday morning after plummeting Friday on fears of a renewed trade war.
Trump has not met in person with Xi since reclaiming power in January after four years in exile — after running for re-election in 2020 on a pledge to “decouple” from China economically and winning the 2024 election suggesting “reparations” for the more than 1 million Americans who died from COVID-19.
Trump’s tariff onslaught this year initially was premised on Chinese fentanyl exports, which killed roughly one in every 1,000 Americans over the past five years.
