dailynewsnblog
By David Lawder and Antoni Slodkowski
NEW YORK, Sept 20 (Reuters) – US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng are set to meet on Sunday to try to tee up potential agreements on AI, tariffs and critical minerals for a high-stakes Washington summit this week between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The meetings at JP Morgan Chase’s headquarters in Manhattan, which also will include US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, are due to start at about 10:30 a.m. (1430 GMT) and are expected to run all day.
Key topics will be the status of a US-China trade truce that is set to expire on November 10, flows of Chinese rare-earth magnets and critical minerals that US officials say are insufficient and potential guard rails for artificial intelligence after reports of key security breaches involving AI models.
The most likely outcome, analysts say, would be 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.
“I think there will be some show of deliverables because of the fact that it’s a presidential summit coming, but I don’t feel like we’re on the verge of some sort of breakthrough,” said Anna Ashton, a longtime China trade analyst and founder of Ashton Intelligence. “I think status quo is probably both sides’ general best expectation.”
Many of the issues that He, Bessent and Greer will have to work through for Trump and Xi are holdovers from the two leaders’ meeting in Beijing in May, including an effort on both sides 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 Bessent-He-Greer meeting follows a pattern set over the past 16 months, in which the three officials met in European and Asian cities to tee up potential agreements for Trump and Xi. These efforts included the November 2025 truce reached in Busan, South Korea, which capped US tariffs imposed during Trump’s second term in office at about 20% on Chinese goods after tit-for-tat escalation had brought them to triple-digit levels on both sides.
The US Supreme Court later struck down the Trump tariffs that were invoked under a national emergencies law, including duties related to fentanyl trafficking.
Trump’s administration has been rebuilding them under new authorities, including restoring a 12.5% tariff on Chinese goods over forced labor allegations. It is finalizing a separate tariff investigation aimed at curbing excess industrial capacity that it says is rampant in China.
