STOCKHOLM: Top officials from the US and China met in Stockholm on Monday for five hours of face-to-face talks, hoping to cool tensions and avoid another round of costly tariffs.
The meeting, held at the Swedish prime minister’s office, is seen as a fresh attempt to steady relations between the world’s two biggest economies after months of back-and-forth trade disputes.
US Treasury Chief Scott Bessent was part of a US negotiating team that arrived at Rosenbad, the Swedish prime minister’s office in central Stockholm, in the early afternoon. China’s Vice Premier He Lifeng was also seen at the venue on video footage.
China is facing an August 12 deadline to reach a durable tariff agreement with President Donald Trump’s administration, after Beijing and Washington reached preliminary deals in May and June to end weeks of escalating tit-for-tat tariffs and a cut-off of rare earth minerals.
Negotiators from both sides were seen exiting the office around 8 pm (1800 GMT) and did not stop to speak with reporters. The discussions are expected to resume on Tuesday.
Trump touched on the talks during a wide-ranging press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Scotland.
“I’d love to see China open up their country,” Trump said.
Without an agreement, global supply chains could face renewed turmoil from US duties snapping back to triple-digit levels that would amount to a bilateral trade embargo.
US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said he did not expect “some kind of enormous breakthrough today” at the talks in Stockholm that he was attending.
“What I expect is continued monitoring and checking in on the implementation of our agreement thus far, making sure that key critical minerals are flowing between the parties and setting the groundwork for enhanced trade and balanced trade going forward,” he told CNBC.
The Stockholm talks follow Trump’s largest trade deal yet with the European Union, announced on Sunday, which includes a 15% tariff on most EU goods exports to the United States.
Xi-Trump meeting?
Trade analysts said that another 90-day extension of a tariff and export control truce, struck in mid-May between China and the United States, was likely.
An extension would facilitate planning for a potential meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, scheduled for late October or early November.
The Financial Times reported on Monday that the US had paused curbs on tech exports to China to avoid disrupting trade talks with Beijing and support Trump’s efforts to secure a meeting with Xi this year.
Meanwhile, in Washington, US senators from both major parties plan to introduce bills this week targeting China over its treatment of minority groups, dissidents, and Taiwan, emphasising security and human rights, which could complicate talks in Stockholm.
Taiwan President Lai Ching-te is set to delay an August trip his team had floated to the Trump administration that would have included stops in the United States, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday.
The potential visit would have infuriated Beijing, possibly derailing the trade talks. China claims Taiwan as its own territory, a position Taiwan rejects, and denounces any show of support for Taipei from the United States.
Previous US-China trade talks in Geneva and London in May and June focused on bringing US and Chinese retaliatory tariffs down from triple-digit levels and restoring the flow of rare earth minerals halted by China and Nvidia’s NVDA.O H20 AI chips, and other goods halted by the United States.
So far, the talks have not delved into broader economic issues. These include US complaints that China’s state-led, export-driven model is flooding world markets with cheap goods, and Beijing’s complaints that US national security export controls on tech goods seek to stunt Chinese growth.
“Geneva and London were really just about trying to get the relationship back on track so that they could, at some point, actually negotiate about the issues which animate the disagreement between the countries in the first place,” said Scott Kennedy, a China economics expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Bessent has already flagged a deadline extension and has said he wants China to rebalance its economy away from exports to more domestic consumption — a decades-long goal for US policymakers.
Analysts say the US-China negotiations are far more complex than those with other Asian countries and will require more time. China’s grip on the global market for rare earth minerals and magnets, used in everything from military hardware to car windscreen wiper motors, has proved to be an effective leverage point on US industries.
