President Trump chats with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a visit to Beijing in 2017.
Andy Wong/AP
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Andy Wong/AP
President Trump has spoken with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday, China said. It would be their first known call since Trump began his second term with a focus on higher tariffs on imports of Chinese goods.
China’s ambassador to the United Nations first announced the talks; the White House has not yet released a statement.
Trump’s last known conversation with Xi was in January, before Inauguration Day, when the two leaders talked about a range of global issues including trade and the then-looming ban on TikTok.
At the time, Chinese goods entering the U.S. (and vice versa) faced an average customs levy of around 20%, most of which was a holdover from tariffs imposed during Trump’s first term in office and which the Biden administration declined to roll back.
But by April, a series of escalating tariffs had brought trade between the two countries to a new precipice.
Trump had started the trade war in February by applying a new 10% tariff — a number that climbed as 145% by April, with Beijing retaliating with tariffs of its own.
A breakthrough came in early May, when the two countries held bilateral trade talks in Geneva. They agreed to a 90-day pause on most of their levies. The U.S. lowered its rate to 30% on Chinese goods, and China cut its tariffs to 10%.
But more recently, Washington and Beijing accused each other of breaking the Geneva agreement. “But I’m sure that I’ll speak to President Xi, and hopefully we’ll work that out,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday.
During his first trade war with China in 2020, trade negotiators with the Trump administration agreed to a “phase one” trade deal with China that called for Beijing to purchase an additional $200 billion in American goods over a two-year period, when compared to a 2017 baseline. Due to the COVID pandemic and dropping demand, China never fulfilled most of those promised purchases.
Trump last met with Xi in June 2019 on the sidelines of a G20 meeting in Japan. A planned U.S. state visit to China in 2020 never materialized because of the pandemic. Since taking office for this second term, Trump has said that he would be willing to travel to China to meet with Xi.
