President Donald Trump said Thursday after meeting with the Chinese president Xi Jinping that he lowered rates in exchange for a crackdown on fentanyl and that he would come to visit China in April.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on the way back to Washington, Trump said he would immediately cut his fentanyl tariff on China from 20% to 10%, after Xi agreed to intensify China’s efforts to stem the illicit international flow of precursor chemicals for the deadly opioid.
He said his meeting with Xi was “great,” rating it a “12” on a scale of one to 10, and said that with few major obstacles remaining, a sweeping trade deal would be ready soon.
Trump said he would visit China in April, and that Xi would visit the United States “some time afterward,” either at Mar-a-Lago or Washington.
The meeting inside South Korea between the two leaders, their first since Trump returned to the White House, lasted about an hour and 40 minutes and was the highlight of Trump’s three-nation tour of Asia.
Some issues were not addressed at all, Trump said, including the status of Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy that Beijing claims as its territory.
Before the meeting, some White House aides worried that Trump would change long-standing U.S. policy on the island in exchange for concessions from China. NBC News reports this earlier this week.
Before the meeting, Trump called Xi an old friend and a “tough negotiator.” His Chinese counterpart acknowledged “frictions” between the world’s two largest economies, saying that “given our different national circumstances, we do not always see eye to eye.”
Other tariffs remain, a White House official said, and there was also no talk of a deal on popular Chinese app TikTok, whose U.S. operations must be sold to an American owner under a law passed last year over national security concerns. Trump had previously said he and Xi might be able to reach one.
Both Trump and Xi wanted the optics and tactical aspects of this meeting to go well, said a person familiar with the advance planning.
Still, Trump continues a long-standing practice of meeting with allies before Beijing, which former Assistant Secretary of State Dave Stilwell said signals the U.S. will not trade its alliance commitments for a deal with China.
During Trump’s five-day trip to Malaysia, Japan and South Korea, he also signed agreements with all three countries Thailand and Cambodia; made new foreign investment announcements; and proclaimed that the leverage of tariffs could push warring parties to withdraw.
Reflecting on his approach, Trump said that sometimes going against the grain can yield results.
“Often you go in the opposite direction of almost everyone, and you will be the one who is right, and the others will be the one who is wrong,” he said in Gyeongju, South Korea, offering a glimpse into his thinking. “That’s where you achieve your greatest successes.”
Miles Yu, a former State Department adviser on China, said the U.S. and Beijing are “taking each other’s heat” as trade is a key point of contention. Washington is pushing for concrete steps on fentanyl, market access and more, he said, while China is “holding back and offering only broad “frameworks.”
“This is the root cause of the five useless negotiations with China so far without a breakthrough,” Yu said, adding that the government is trying to change China’s approach by uniting its neighbors, a strategy he said “may or may not work.”
After talks with Chinese counterparts in Malaysia last weekend, Finance Minister Scott Bessent said negotiators had formed a framework for Trump and Xi to consider this: tariffs, trade, fentanyl, rare earths and “substantial” purchases of US agricultural products.
He believed in the threat of Trump an additional rate of 100% with creating influence and said he believed the framework would avoid that outcome and open space for addressing other issues.
Xi said Thursday that the framework agreed in Malaysia had “provided the necessary conditions for our meeting today.”
Dan Caldwell, former senior advisor to the US Secretary of Defense Piet HegsethTrump deserved credit for pursuing a pragmatic China policy that maintained what he saw as strategic ambiguity while taking steps to restore key military capabilities to deter Chinese aggression, Trump said.
“A lot of people wanted to assume he would be reflexively aggressive toward China,” Caldwell said of Trump. “That has not been the case.”
But Caldwell cautioned against expecting a breakthrough in Busan. “I don’t think the overall momentum depends on one meeting,” Caldwell said. “Ideally these go well, but the whole thing doesn’t depend on just one set of conversations.”
In other words, the goal was to make enough progress to get to the next date between the two leaders.
Analysts in the region also saw limited room for a major agreement this week.
“Some kind of consensus and agreements are very possible,” said Zeng Jinghan, professor of international relations at the City University of Hong Kong, as both sides want “a little bit of de-escalation.”
But Trump and Xi were unlikely to reach a comprehensive deal that would resolve structural differences between their countries in the long term, he said.
Hopes are instead focused on “less aggressive” rhetoric, Zeng said, with both Beijing and Washington likely to backtrack and declare the meeting a success.
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