Top economic officials from China and the United States have begun talks in New York City aimed at clearing the way for possible agreements on trade, artificial intelligence and critical minerals ahead of a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping later this week. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng began talks at JPMorgan Chase’s Manhattan headquarters on Sunday morning, with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer also taking part. The talks come four days before Trump is due to host Xi at the White House, with both sides looking to ease tensions between the world’s two largest economies.
At the top of the agenda is a fragile US-China trade truce due to expire on November 10. The agreement, reached in Busan, South Korea, last November, capped US tariffs on Chinese goods at about 20 percent after a tit-for-tat trade fight briefly pushed tariffs into the triple digits. Washington is also pressuring Beijing over its supply of rare-earth magnets and other critical minerals, crucial to industries ranging from cars to advanced semiconductors.
China promised to restore the flow of critical minerals under last year’s truce, but a senior US official said on Friday that Beijing’s performance had “not been up to par”. Artificial intelligence (AI) is also expected to feature prominently, adding a relatively new issue to negotiations long dominated by trade. Bessent has said the countries could discuss AI “guardrails” aimed at addressing shared risks, including preventing powerful models from falling into the hands of malign non-state actors.
The talks are expected to cover both open- and closed-weight AI models. Chinese open-weight models have increasingly attracted US companies, in part because they can be cheaper than closed systems developed by US firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic. China remains one of Tehran’s most important economic partners and buys much of its oil, making Beijing an important target of Washington’s efforts to increase economic pressure on Iran as the US-Israel war on Iran enters its seventh month.
Despite the packed agenda, analysts are not expecting a sweeping breakthrough. Sunday’s negotiations are part of a series of meetings between Bessent, He and Greer over the past 16 months aimed at hammering out areas of agreement before Trump and Xi meet face to face.
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