The US and China have agreed on a deal to help resolve the trade war raging between the world’s two largest economies, top Trump administration officials announced Sunday.
Details of the deal — struck during negotiations in Switzerland over the weekend — were not revealed, but officials teased that more information will be shared on Monday.
“The U.S. has a massive $1.2 trillion trade deficit, so the President declared a national emergency,” US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Sunday. “We’re confident that the deal we struck with our Chinese partners will help us work toward resolving that national emergency.”
AP
President Trump has imposed tariffs of up to 145% on goods from China, with China slapping retaliatory tariffs on American exports.
Greer joined Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng for the talks in Geneva, Switzerland, over the weekend to address the triple-digit tariff.
“I can tell you that the talks were productive,” Bessent teased.
The announcement comes after the Trump administration unveiled a framework for a trade deal with the United Kingdom last week.
China is America’s third-largest trading partner and has long drawn ire from Trump over its practices, including exporting deadly fentanyl, currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, forced technology transfers and more.
Some estimates have pegged annual Chinese IP theft from the US at $225 to $600 billion annually.
Last year, the US had a $295.4 billion trade deficit with China, a major pet peeve of Trump’s.
During his second term, Trump slapped a 20% tariff against China, seeking concessions on the fentanyl crisis.
Then on “Liberation Day,” he unveiled so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on Beijing, prompting swift retaliation.
Despite the vast differences, Trump administration officials claim that they made remarkable progress with China in about two days.
“It’s important to understand how quickly we were able to come to [an] agreement, which reflects that perhaps the differences were not so large as maybe thought,” Greer added.
“There was a lot of groundwork that went into these two days.”
On Saturday, Trump crowed that “GREAT PROGRESS MADE” in deliberations with China.
The president’s team is frantically working to strike lightning deals with a bevy of countries, given Trump’s July 8 deadline to reach an agreement or else face the customized higher rates he announced last month.
Those “Liberation Day” tariffs tossed the global markets into chaos when Trump announced them in the White House Rose Garden on April 2.
The pandemonium that ensued as world leaders, businesses and consumers alike struggled to wrap their heads around the tariffs – many of which seemed to be determined with little financial analysis – tanked the stock markets, all but wiping out the economic “Trump bump” the president enjoyed since his November election.