Trump cuts China tariffs to 47%, says strikes deal with China’s Xi on rare earth exports

[BUSAN, South Korea] US President Donald Trump said he had struck a deal to reduce tariffs on China to 47 per cent in exchange for Beijing resuming US soybean purchases, keeping rare earths exports flowing and cracking down on the illicit trade of fentanyl.

He said there will be an extendable one-year deal on the supply of crucial rare earths, and that it would be renegotiated annually.

Trump also said his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping was a “great success” and that he would head to China in April for new talks.

“I’ll be going to China in April and he’ll be coming here sometime after that, whether it’s in Florida, Palm Beach or Washington, DC,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One.

China has yet to comment on what was agreed by the two leaders in talks, which ran for almost two hours.

On Nvidia, soybeans, fentanyl-related tariffs and Taiwan

Trump also said he did not discuss chipmaker Nvidia’s state-of-art Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chip during talks with Xi.

He was walking back the previous day’s remarks about potentially helping the company to export a scaled-down version of its current flagship GPU processor, a key component in the AI race.

The deal also included the US halving fentanyl-related tariffs on Chinese goods effective immediately, said Trump.

China also pledged to purchase “tremendous” amounts of American soybeans, according to Trump. Beijing will start buying the oilseed immediately, he said, without providing any details on volumes.

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The US trade with China was worth more than US$12 billion last year, and the lack of buying from the Asian nation has hurt American farmers and given Beijing a key bargaining chip during trade talks. Prior to the summit, China signalled some goodwill by making its first purchases of US supplies this season.

His remarks after the face-to-face talks with Xi in the South Korean city of Busan, their first since 2019, marked the finale of Trump’s whirlwind Asia trip on which he also touted trade breakthroughs with South Korea, Japan and South-east Asian nations.

The meeting, which took place on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, lasted nearly two hours. Trump shook hands and escorted Xi to his car before the US president was given a red carpet send off at the airport.

Trump repeatedly talked up the prospect of reaching agreement with Xi since US negotiators on Oct 26 said they had agreed a framework with China that will avoid 100 per cent US tariffs on Chinese goods and achieve a deferral of China’s export curbs on rare earths, a sector it dominates.

But with both countries increasingly willing to play hardball over areas of economic and geopolitical competition, many questions remain about how long any trade detente may last.

Taiwan was not discussed in his meeting with Xi, Trump added. Taiwan “never came up”. “That was not discussed actually.” REUTERS, BLOOMBERG, AFP