Trump Has One Major Focus While in China: Trade |
FP’s analysis and reporting
Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at a preview of the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing, growing pressure for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to resign, and gunfire in the Philippine Senate.
Cue the pomp and pageantry. U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in Beijing on Wednesday ahead of a high-stakes summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping the following day. Trump’s first visit to mainland China in nearly a decade comes at a pivotal time for U.S. economic policy. As the White House seeks new deals to reduce the country’s trade deficit, Trump is expected to downplay other concerns between the two countries as well as his own voters’ worries about high costs of living due to the Iran war.
Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at a preview of the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing, growing pressure for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to resign, and gunfire in the Philippine Senate.
Cue the pomp and pageantry. U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in Beijing on Wednesday ahead of a high-stakes summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping the following day. Trump’s first visit to mainland China in nearly a decade comes at a pivotal time for U.S. economic policy. As the White House seeks new deals to reduce the country’s trade deficit, Trump is expected to downplay other concerns between the two countries as well as his own voters’ worries about high costs of living due to the Iran war.
“I have a great relationship with President Xi, and I think it’s going to remain that way,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday before departing for China. Although he said that several major issues will be on the agenda, he stressed that the conversation will be about trade “more than anything else.”
Both sides appear interested in extending a fragile truce on China’s rare earths. In October, the White House announced that Beijing had agreed to “effectively eliminate China’s current and proposed export controls on rare earth elements.” In exchange, the United States reduced some of its highest threatened tariffs on Chinese goods. Experts expect Trump and Xi to discuss a deal on Thursday to keep the flow of rare earths going, even as Chinese customs data indicates that exports of several critical resources produced at scale........