Bilateral ties: Trump shakes hands with Xi as they arrive for talks in South Korea. Despite addressing some key issues, the agreement fails to comprehensively address all of the issues at the heart of the US-China trade fight. — AFP
WASHINGTON: China will effectively suspend implementation of additional export controls on rare earth metals and terminate investigations targeting US companies in the semiconductor supply chain, according to the White House.
The White House issued a fact sheet last Saturday outlining some details of the trade pact agreed to earlier last week by President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping that aimed to ease tensions between the world’s largest economies.
Under the deal, China will issue general licences valid for exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite “for the benefit of the US end users and their suppliers around the world,” the White House said, meaning the effective removal of controls China imposed in April 2025 and October 2022.
The United States and China previously said Beijing would suspend more restrictive controls announced in October 2025 for one year.
Washington will also pause some of Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs on China for an additional year and is halting plans to implement a 100% tariff on Chinese exports to the United States that was threatened for November.
The White House also said that the United States will further extend the expiration of certain Section 301 tariff exclusions, currently due to expire on Nov 29, 2025, until Nov 10, 2026.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment last Saturday.
The landmark summit between Trump and Xi, their first face-to-face meeting of the US president’s second term, saw the leaders stabilise relations in the short term after an escalating trade fight that had roiled markets and sparked fears of a global downturn.
Under their agreement, according to the White House, China agreed to pause sweeping controls on rare-earth magnets in exchange for a US agreement to roll back an expansion of curbs on Chinese companies.
China had used its dominance in the processing of rare-earth minerals as leverage, threatening to restrict their flow to the United States and allied countries.
The United States also agreed to halve a fentanyl-related tariff to 10% from 20%, while Beijing will resume purchases of American soybeans and other agricultural products.
The United States has said China will buy 12 million tonnes of soybeans during the current season and a minimum of 25 million tonnes a year for the next three years.
Trump last Friday indicated he would like to remove all of the fentanyl-related tariffs if China continued to crack down on exports of the drug and precursor chemicals used to make it.
“As soon as we see that, we’ll get rid of the other 10%,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One last Friday.
The United States also said last Saturday that Beijing will take steps to allow the Chinese facilities of Dutch chipmaker Nexperia BV to resume shipments, confirming a Bloomberg report from a day earlier.
This move will likely ease worries about chip shipments that had threatened auto production as a trade fight between China and the United States escalated.
But while the agreement has calmed tensions, the pact may be a short-term truce in an extended trade fight, with the measures just meant to last one year.
And despite addressing some key issues – and with both sides winning key concessions – the agreement fails to comprehensively address all of the issues at the heart of the US-China trade fight and other geopolitical flashpoints such as Taiwan and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Trump has signed off on a plan that would see an American consortium buy the US operations of ByteDance Ltd’s TikTok application, but Beijing has yet to formally approve that sale.
The US president has also said there would be cooperation on energy, saying that China had agreed to purchase oil and gas from Alaska. — Bloomberg
