Key Takeaways
- US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng will meet on Sunday.
- The talks will focus on AI, tariffs, and critical minerals.
- The discussions aim to avoid escalating tensions in the US-China trade relationship.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng are set to meet on Sunday to discuss key trade issues, including artificial intelligence (AI), tariffs, and critical minerals. The meeting, which will take place at JP Morgan Chase’s headquarters in Manhattan, is expected to run all day, starting at around 10:30 a.m. (1430 GMT).
The talks are part of ongoing efforts to prepare for a high-stakes Washington summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, scheduled for this week. The meeting will also include US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
Key topics for discussion include the status of a US-China trade truce that is set to expire on November 10, the flow of Chinese rare-earth magnets and critical minerals, and potential guardrails for AI after reports of key security breaches involving AI models.
Analysts suggest that the most likely outcome is for Washington and Beijing to agree on small steps to show they are continuing to avoid escalating tensions in a delicate trade relationship that has major consequences for the global economy.
Many of the issues to be addressed in the Bessent-He-Greer meeting are holdovers from the two leaders' meeting in Beijing in May, including efforts to cut tariffs on non-strategic goods and Chinese pledges to increase purchases of US agricultural goods by $17 billion a year and to purchase more than 200 Boeing aircraft.
The US Supreme Court has struck down some of the Trump tariffs that were invoked under a national emergencies law, including duties related to fentanyl trafficking. However, a senior US official has stated that China’s performance on restoring the flow of critical minerals to US and global users has not been up to par and will be a topic for discussion.
The meeting follows a pattern set over the past 16 months, in which the three officials met in European and Asian cities to prepare for potential agreements for Trump and Xi. These efforts included the November 2025 truce reached in Busan, South Korea, which capped US tariffs on Chinese goods at about 20% after tit-for-tat escalation had brought them to triple-digit levels on both sides.
Under that truce, China promised to restore the flow of critical minerals to US and global users. However, a senior US official has stated that China’s performance on that front has not been up to par and will be a topic for discussion ahead of the Trump-Xi summit.
