US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said that he would meet his Chinese counterparts in Sweden this week to continue trade talks between the two countries, suggesting the current pause in sky-high tariffs aimed at each other could be extended.
Bessent told Fox Business that he would speak with Chinese officials on Monday and Tuesday for a third round of high-level talks in Stockholm – following face-to-face discussions he held with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Geneva and London – to work out a likely extension of the pause beyond mid-August.
Beijing has yet to confirm the Stockholm talks, but Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said in a post on X on Tuesday that his country would play host to the US-China negotiations next week.
After US President Donald Trump’s announcement of “reciprocal” tariffs on April 2, Washington and Beijing raised punitive levies on each other’s exports to triple-digit percentage levels.
Since then, trade relations have thawed somewhat as the countries have engaged in talks, marked by a June telephone call between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
On Monday Bessent said that the talks were “in a good place”, a sanguine take on negotiations echoed by Beijing’s embassy in Washington, which said “new progress” had been made in resolving each other’s economic and trade concerns.
Separately on Tuesday, Trump told reporters that Xi has invited him to visit Beijing and that he would accept. He added that exports of rare earth and magnets to the US may no longer be a thorny issue.
“President Xi has invited me to China, and we’ll probably be doing that in the not too distant future, a little bit out, but not too distant. And I’ve been invited by a lot of people, and we’ll make those decisions pretty soon,” he said during a meeting in the Oval Office with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr.
“We have a very good relationship. In fact, the magnets, which is a little complex piece of material, but the magnets are coming out very well. They’re sending them in record numbers. We’re getting along with China very well,” said Trump.
In a possible signal of improving ties, China’s market administration watchdog said earlier on Tuesday that it had suspended its anti-trust probe into American multinational chemical company DuPont.
Beijing launched its investigation into DuPont in early April, after Trump began slapping new levies on Chinese goods.
Bessent said on Monday that he hoped to raise in future talks the issue of China’s purchases of Russian and Iranian oil.
Beijing’s embassy in Washington responded to those comments by saying that “the international community, including China, has conducted normal cooperation with Iran and Russia within the framework of international law.
“This is reasonable and lawful without harm done to any third party, and deserves to be respected and protected,” said the embassy.
China observers said that Beijing would oppose Washington’s bid to link tariff talks to Chinese relations with US adversaries.
“Beijing sees its ties and transactions with Russia and Iran as just and fair and conforms to international laws and may be unlikely to make compromises for the sake of US lowering tariffs,” said Xin Qiang, an international studies professor at Fudan University in Shanghai.
“Beijing is mindful not to fall into the trap as US uses tariffs to pursue its geopolitical agenda.”
During the Fox Business interview Bessent also mentioned his expectations for China’s government to rein in manufacturing overcapacity and launch structural adjustments to stimulate domestic consumption to benefit American manufacturing.
“President Trump is remaking the US into a manufacturing economy. If we could do that together – more U.S. manufacturing, more Chinese consumption – that would be a home run for the Chinese Communist Party and the global economy,” he said. - SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
