US Treasury Secretary Bessent aims to meet with Chinese official in next few weeks
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that he will meet with his Chinese counterpart sometime in the next couple of weeks.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that he expected to meet with his Chinese counterpart in the coming weeks to advance discussions on trade and other issues between the world's two largest economies.
While Mr Bessent did not identify his counterpart by name, the Treasury secretary has engaged in the past with Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng, who led his country's delegation for talks in London in June with the US on trade.
'I'm going to be meeting with my Chinese counterpart at sometime in the next couple of weeks,' Mr Bessent said in an interview on July 7 on CNBC.
'I think there are things for us to do together if the Chinese want to do it,' he added. 'So we will discuss whether we are able to move beyond trade into other areas.'
China's Ministry of Commerce did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The US and China exchanged crippling tit-for-tat tariffs earlier i n 2025 that threatened to choke off trade, unnerving financial markets fearing the clash would spark a global downturn.
Negotiations in Geneva and later in London saw the two nations agree to a truce under which Beijing agreed to ease the export of rare earth minerals critical to a slew of US industries ranging from chips, clean energy and transportation, in exchange for the US lifting some of its restrictions.
Those minerals have held an outsized importance in discussions between the countries. Mr Bessent last week cautioned that flows of those critical materials still had not returned to levels seen in April 2025 .
Still, the framework between the US and China is far from comprehensive and there remain complicated questions to resolve, including Mr Trump's concerns about fentanyl trafficking and his efforts to secure a deal for the divestiture of the American operations of social media app TikTok from its Chinese parent ByteDance.
That deal requires Beijing's sign-off, giving the country a source of leverage to potentially extract concessions from the US on trade and other issues. Mr Trump has said he has a prospective buyer for TikTok – an investor consortium that includes Oracle Corp, Blackstone and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. BLOOMBERG
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