China has agreed to buy at least US$17 billion in US agricultural products annually through 2028, the White House said on Sunday.
The commitment resulted from the summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping last week and will be in addition to soybean purchase commitments that were made in October 2025, according to a fact sheet released by the White House.
Trump concluded his highly-anticipated state visit to China on Friday, during which he discussed topics spanning trade, Taiwan and Iran with Xi.
The White House statement came a day after China’s Ministry of Commerce disclosed some of the trade outcomes Beijing and Washington had reached during the summit.
In a statement on Saturday, the ministry said the US and China would discuss tariff reductions through a newly established trade board, and had “agreed in principle to lower tariffs on products of respective concern on a comparable scale”.
The products would include agricultural goods, the ministry said.
But the White House fact sheet released on Sunday provided several details that the ministry had not made public.
The new board of trade would allow Washington and Beijing to “manage bilateral trade across non-sensitive goods”, the White House said, while a separate board of investment would “provide a government-to-government forum for discussing investment-related issues”.
The White House also reaffirmed China’s commitment to purchase 200 Boeing aircraft.
In addition, the fact sheet said China would “address U.S. concerns regarding supply chain shortages related to rare earths and other critical minerals, including yttrium, scandium, neodymium, and indium”, as well as “U.S. concerns regarding prohibitions or restrictions on the sale of rare earth production and processing equipment and technologies”.
A substantial portion of Sunday’s fact sheet seemingly reflected the trade agreement that the world’s two largest economies brokered in October.
Under that deal, Beijing committed to buying at least 12 million tonnes (13.2 million tons) of US soybeans during the last two months of 2025 and a minimum of 25 million tonnes annually in each of 2026, 2027 and 2028.
The October package also included a Chinese pledge to “issue general licences valid for exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite for the benefit of US end users and their suppliers around the world”.
According to Sunday’s fact sheet, China had restored market access for US beef by renewing expired listings of more than 400 US beef facilities and adding new ones.
“China will work with U.S. regulators to lift all suspensions of U.S. beef facilities,” the White House document said.
The White House added that China had resumed imports of poultry from US states that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) had determined were free of highly pathogenic bird flu.
China’s Ministry of Commerce said on Saturday that the US would also “actively work to resolve China’s long-standing concerns over the automatic detention of dairy and aquatic products, the export of bonsai grown in growing medium to the US, and the recognition of Shandong as an avian influenza-free zone”.
US agricultural exports to China have fallen sharply since rounds of tit-for-tat tariffs imposed last year curtailed trade, dropping 65.7 per cent year-on-year to US$8.4 billion in 2025, according to USDA data.
That said, if this is a litmus test of the trade board, the early results are underwhelming.
Beijing’s October pledge to buy 25 million tonnes of US soybeans a year would be worth about US$10.5 billion, based on USDA’s latest projected season-average price.
Added to the new US$17 billion target for other agricultural products, the combined annual commitment of around US$27.5 billion still falls more than 30 per cent below the record US$40.9 billion in US agricultural exports to China in 2022 before Trump launched his trade war. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
