THE US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng were scheduled to meet in Manhattan for day-long talks aimed at building momentum on AI, tariffs and critical minerals ahead of a high-stakes Washington summit this week between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The discussions yesterday at JPMorgan Chase’s headquarters, which were expected to include US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, focused on establishing preliminary deliverables before the two leaders gather.
Key topics on the table were the status of a US-China trade truce set to expire on Nov 10, flows of Chinese rare-earth magnets and critical minerals that US officials say are insufficient, and potential guardrails for artificial intelligence following reports of key security breaches involving AI models.
The most likely outcome, an analyst said, would be for Washington and Beijing to agree on small steps to show they are continuing to avoid escalating tensions in a delicate trade relationship that has major consequences for the global economy.
“I think there will be some show of deliverables because of the fact that it’s a presidential summit coming, but I don’t feel like we’re on the verge of some sort of breakthrough,” said Anna Ashton, a long-time China trade analyst and founder of Ashton Intelligence.
Many of the issues that He, Bessent and Greer were set to work through for Trump and Xi are holdovers from the two leaders’ meeting in Beijing in May.
These include an effort on both sides to cut tariffs on non-strategic goods, alongside Chinese pledges to increase purchases of US agricultural goods by US$17bil (RM69.36bil) a year and to purchase more than 200 Boeing aircraft.
Yesterday’s agenda followed a pattern set over the past 16 months, in which the three officials met in European and Asian cities to tee up potential agreements for Trump and Xi.
Those past efforts included a November 2025 truce reached in Busan, South Korea, which capped US tariffs imposed during Trump’s second term in office at about 20% on Chinese goods after tit-for-tat escalation had brought them to triple-digit levels on both sides.
The US Supreme Court later struck down the Trump tariffs that were invoked under a national emergency law.
Under the Busan truce, China had promised to restore the flow of critical minerals to the United States and global users. — Reuters
