By David Lawder and Joe Cash
WASHINGTON/BEIJING, April 30 (Reuters) - The top U.S. and Chinese economic officials held “candid” talks on Thursday ahead of a meeting set for May between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping, with both sides raising complaints about the other’s trade policies, the U.S. Treasury and Chinese state media said.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a post on X that he spoke with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng to discuss Trump’s travel to Beijing, planned for May 14 to May 15.
“Our meeting was both candid and comprehensive, and I stressed that China’s recent provocative extraterritorial regulations have a chilling effect on global supply chains,” Bessent said.
His comment breaks the Trump administration’s near silence on new supply chain rules from Beijing that have alarmed U.S. businesses. Analysts have called these a major escalation that could seriously undercut American efforts to reduce supply chain dependence on China.
China’s rules, rolled out in recent weeks, lay the legal groundwork for punishing foreign companies that seek to shift their sourcing for critical minerals and other goods away from China, as Bessent, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and the Trump administration seek to do.
Bessent offered no U.S. response to the new regulation and said he looks forward to “a productive summit between President Trump and President Xi in Beijing.”
‘RESTRICTIVE’ TRADE MEASURES
Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said Vice Premier He Lifeng had “candid, in-depth and constructive exchanges” with Bessent and Greer over a video call.
The Chinese side “expressed serious concern over the recent U.S. restrictive trade measures against China”, but both sides agreed to further enhance consensus, manage differences and strengthen cooperation, according to CCTV.
The trio last met in March for in-person trade talks in Paris, to lay groundwork for the Trump-Xi summit, discussing potential Chinese purchases of U.S. agriculture goods and potential new joint bodies to manage trade and investment issues between the world’s two largest economies.
During those meetings, the Chinese officials also raised complaints about Trump’s new tariff investigations targeting China. But Trump delayed his trip to Beijing because of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
China said the video call was aimed at “properly resolving economic and trade issues of mutual concern and expanding pragmatic cooperation,” a sign that the Beijing summit was on track.
In a separate call on Thursday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, was the “biggest point of risk” in U.S.-China ties ahead of the Trump-Xi summit.
The two countries reached an uneasy trade truce last October when they met in Busan, South Korea, following a months-long tit-for-tat trade war sparked by Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs and China’s restrictions on exports of rare-earths and other critical minerals that it dominates. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Trump’s global duties in February, prompting the Trump administration to launch new tariff investigations to rebuild them.
INDUSTRY WARNINGS
As the Trump-Xi summit draws closer, U.S. lawmakers and industry groups are warning the Trump administration against offering China investment access to the U.S. automotive sector, arguing this would hollow out a core domestic industry and create national security risks through data collection.
Ten steel industry groups urged Bessent, Greer, Rubio and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in a letter on Thursday “to ensure American competitiveness by not surrendering access to the U.S. auto market to the Chinese Communist Party.”
Ahead of the planned May summit, ties between Beijing and Washington have remained largely calm despite energy and geopolitical complications brought by the war on Iran.
The two have also sought to ramp up leverage before the leaders meet, with China rolling out the new supply chain regulations and Washington curbing tool shipments to one of China’s leading chipmakers. During Thursday’s call, both sides expressed willingness to “promote the healthy, stable and sustainable development of China-U.S. economic and trade relations,” Chinese state media said.
(Reporting by Xiuhao Chen, Shi Bu, Joe Cash and David Lawder; Editing by Alison Williams, Sharon Singleton, David Gregorio and Nia Williams)
