Trump ready to meet with Xi in South Korea: Bessent
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insisted that the US does not want to escalate the trade dispute with China, insisting that President Donald Trump is ready to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea later this month.
Bessent said at an event on CNBC that officials from both countries were in daily contact to arrange the meeting and that Washington did not want to leave the world’s second-largest economy.
He said the reason the trade dispute between the two countries did not escalate further was due to the trust between Trump and Xi.
The two countries appeared poised to return to an all-out trade war late last week after China announced Thursday it would greatly expand rare earth export controls.
Trump responded on Friday by threatening to increase tariffs on Chinese goods to triple-digit levels, sending financial markets and U.S.-China relations into a tailspin.
Bessent and other officials tried to get relations back on track in a series of interviews this week.
On Wednesday, Bessent said China clearly “intended to take action from the very beginning” and rejected China’s claim that the moves were in response to U.S. actions.
Bessent told CNBC that a low-level Chinese trade official threatened to “create chaos” if the United States continued to impose port fees on Chinese ships in August.
“There was a lower-level trader here in August who was a little disturbed… He was saying that if the United States continued to impose docking fees on Chinese ships, China would create chaos in the global system,” Bessent said.
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