US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will speak soon to iron out trade issues including a dispute over critical minerals, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said yesterday.
Trump on Friday accused China of violating an agreement with the US to mutually roll back tariffs and trade restrictions for critical minerals.
“What China is doing is they are holding back products that are essential for the industrial supply chains of India, of Europe. And that is not what a reliable partner does,” Bessent said in an interview with CBS’ Face the Nation.
“I am confident that when President Trump and Party Chairman Xi have a call, that this will be ironed out. But the fact that they are withholding some of the products that they agreed to release during our agreement – maybe it’s a glitch in the Chinese system, maybe it’s intentional. We’ll see after the President speaks with the party chairman.”
Trump said on Friday he was sure that he would speak to Xi. China said in April that the two leaders had not had a conversation recently.
Asked if a talk with Xi was on Trump’s schedule, Bessent said, “I believe we’ll see something very soon.”
White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said no specific date for the conversation has been set, but there have been discussions that the leaders will talk about last month’s Geneva agreement on some tariff disputes.
“President Trump, we expect, is going to have a wonderful conversation about the trade negotiations this week with President Xi. That’s our expectation,” Hassett said.
Meanwhile, Australia’s defence minister Richard Marles has called on China to explain why it needs to have ‘such an extraordinary military build-up’.
He said Beijing needs to provide greater transparency and reassurance as it is the ‘fundamental issue’ for the region.
The Philippines defence minister Gilberto Teodoro Jr has called China ‘absolutely irresponsible and reckless’ in its actions in the South China Sea.
The ministers had separately addressed reporters on the sidelines of an Asian defence summit held in Singapore.
China has yet to respond to either Marles or Teodoro.
Marles asserted that “what we have seen from China is the single biggest increase in military capability and build up in conventional sense, by any country since the end of the Second World War”.
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