Trump and Xi reach preliminary trade understandings as tariff and export disputes ease

The United States and China appear to have found at least some common ground on a few different issues, during this week’s meeting between President Donald Trump and President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping, at the APEC meeting in South Korea.

But tensions appear to have subsequently cooled this week.

According to various reports, the U.S. and China have come to terms on various initiatives, while they have yet to be officially confirmed, including:

• China promising to suspend its limits on exports of rare earth metals imposed for at least one year;
• the U.S. reducing tariffs on China related to fentanyl-precursor chemicals from 20% to 10%, contingent on China to take strong action on these chemicals, bringing down the tariff on goods imported to the U.S. from China, to 47%;
• Trump said on social media that China will commit to purchasing U.S. soybeans, in addition to other agricultural products; and
• A Wall Street Journal report said that the U.S. agreed, for one year, to hold off on a September move to apply export restrictions to certain subsidiaries of already blacklisted entries, as per the Chinese Commerce Ministry, as well as the U.S. and China pausing reciprocal port fees on each other’s vessels for one year

This comes on the heels of a social media post issued by Trump earlier this month, in which he said, at the time, that effective November 1, “America will impose a Tariff of 100% on China, over and above any Tariff that they are currently paying. Also on November 1st, we will impose Export Controls on any and all critical software.”

The impetus for this planned action, Trump said, was due to China taking what he described as an extraordinarily aggressive position on trade, in the form of imposing large scale export controls on nearly every product made in China and some not made in China, including rare earth minerals, which a Washington Post report noted are vital for both high-tech and defense supply chains.