The trade war is not over. But a narrow opening has appeared — and both sides seem eager to use it before a critical deadline hits.
Ahead of an expected summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Washington on September 24, Beijing confirmed Thursday that negotiators from both countries are working to reduce import taxes on $30 billion worth of goods from each side. The announcement, delivered by China’s Commerce Ministry spokesperson Huang Ling at a weekly briefing, signals that trade will dominate the agenda when the two leaders meet for their third face-to-face encounter in under a year.
The backdrop matters. Trump escalated tariffs on Chinese imports to extreme levels earlier this year, triggering retaliatory measures from Beijing in a cycle that rattled global markets and disrupted supply chains worldwide. The May truce paused that escalation. What’s being negotiated now is not a resolution — it’s a managed de-escalation, limited in scope and carefully hedged by both sides. That’s a meaningful distinction. Structural tensions over technology, investment, and market access remain entirely unresolved, and nothing on the current agenda touches those deeper fault lines. Still, reducing tariffs on $60 billion in combined trade, however targeted, would offer measurable relief to manufacturers and consumers bearing the cost of this conflict. Whether the September summit delivers even that modest outcome depends on whether two governments with fundamentally different economic models can agree on what counts as “equivalent” — and whether Trump, who built his political brand on tariff maximalism, is willing to claim a partial rollback as a win.