CNN
—
President Donald Trump announced Friday that US and Chinese officials will meet in London on Monday to discuss trade between the two nations.
“I am pleased to announce that Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, and United States Trade Representative, Ambassador Jamieson Greer, will be meeting in London on Monday, June 9, 2025, with Representatives of China, with reference to the Trade Deal,” the president wrote in a post on Truth Social.
The announcement comes after Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping spoke for 90 minutes on Thursday. After the phone call, the US president said he was encouraged that ongoing trade tensions could soon be resolved.
The last talks between the Trump administration and their Chinese counterparts, held on May 12 in Geneva, represented a major turning point for the global trade war. Delegates from China and the United States announced they would significantly roll back their historically high tariffs on one another. Markets rallied, Wall Street banks curtailed their recession forecasts, and moribund USconsumer confidence rebounded significantly.
That marked a significant change from April, when tensions ran so high that trade between the United States and China came to an effective halt. The 145% tariffs on most Chinese imported goods made the math impossible for American businesses to buy virtually anything from China, America’s second-largest trading partner.
But since then, tensions had re-escalated. Trump on Wednesday said in a Truth Social post that Chinese leader Xi Jinping was “extremely hard to make a deal with.” Trade talks have stalled, Bessent said, apparently frustrating Trump.
Last week, Trump posted on social media that China “TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US.” Trump said that he made a “fast deal” with China to “save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation.” He added: “So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”
The Trump administration had expected China to lift restrictions on rare earth materials that are critical components for a wide range of electronics, but China has largely refused, causing intense displeasure inside the Trump administration and prompting a recent series of measures to be imposed on the country three administration officials told CNN last week.
For example, the White House warned US companies against using AI chips made by China’s national tech champion Huawei. It stopped US companies from selling to China software that is used to design semiconductors. And the US State Department announced it would “aggressively revoke visas” for some Chinese students in America.
China, in turn, has accused the United States of “provoking new economic and trade frictions.”
“The United States has been unilaterally provoking new economic and trade frictions, exacerbating the uncertainty and instability of bilateral economic and trade relations,” the Chinese Commerce Ministry said Sunday.
In the meantime, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, America’s chief negotiator in the détente with China, said talks with China had stalled.
But Trump and and Chinese leader Xi Jinping held a long-awaited phone call Thursday, which appears to have lowered the temperature a bit. The New York Times on Friday reported China has issued some licenses for rare earths, although the market is hardly back open.
The talks in the UK are significant, and much is riding on their success – US economic growth remains steady but there are signs of cracking. And no one wants to return to April’s standoff, which threatened to plunge the global economy into a recession.
US stocks, which had rallied earlier in the day on a strong jobs report, rose a bit higher after Trump’s Truth Social message about the resumed talks. The Dow was up 450 points, or 1.1%. The S&P 500 rose 1.2%, and the Nasdaq was 1.3% higher.
