By David Lawder
PARIS, March 16 (Reuters) – A delay to a planned summit this month between the U.S. and Chinese presidents would not stem from trade disagreements but from the possibility Donald Trump may need to remain in the United States because of the war with Iran, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Monday.
Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng led two days of talks in Paris aimed at preparing the highly anticipated meeting between Trump and China’s Xi Jinping from March 31 to April 2.
Speaking to CNBC, Bessent said the meetings had been “very good” and benefited from a “stable relationship”.
However, he left open whether the leaders’ summit would go ahead as scheduled after Trump told the Financial Times in an interview published on Sunday that he could also postpone as he presses Beijing to help unblock the crucial Strait of Hormuz closed by Iran.
Bessent said any delay would not be because Trump had asked China to police the strait. “The President wants to remain in DC to coordinate the war effort, and that traveling abroad at a time like this may not be optimal,” Bessent said.
TRADE TALKS
The U.S. and Chinese delegations resumed talks on Monday at the Paris headquarters of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of mostly wealthy democracies that does not count China as a member.
In the talks, which began on Sunday, the Chinese showed openness to potential additional purchases of U.S. agricultural goods including poultry, beef and non-soybean row crops, one source said before the second day of meetings.
China was still committed to buying 25 million metric tons of American soybeans annually for the next three years under the Trump-Xi October 2025 trade truce, the source added.
Spokespersons for the U.S. Treasury and the U.S. Trade Representative’s office declined to characterize the talks.
In a statement on Monday, China’s commerce ministry rebuked the United States over a trade investigation into forced labour, urging Washington to “correct its wrongdoings”.
“Meaningful” progress in Sino‑U.S. economic cooperation could restore confidence to an increasingly fragile global economy, the official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary on Sunday.
The Paris talks follow several meetings to ease tension last year between Bessent, He, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Chinese chief trade negotiator Li Chenggang.
MANAGED TRADE MECHANISM
The two sides discussed the establishment of new formal mechanisms to help manage trade and investment between the world’s two largest economies that Trump and Xi could discuss in Beijing, two sources said. Technical talks on the proposed U.S.-China “Board of Trade” and “Board of Investment” were expected on Monday.
One of the sources said the Board of Trade was the more developed proposal and would be aimed at finding products and sectors where the U.S. and China could grow trade in a balanced way without compromising each other’s national security or critical supply chains.
The Board of Investment would not set broad investment policies but would address “discrete investment issues” that may arise between the countries, the source said.
CRITICAL MINERALS, ENERGY
The sources also said U.S. officials discussed the flow of Chinese-produced critical minerals to U.S. companies and raised concerns about the U.S. aerospace industry’s lack of access to yttrium from China, which is used in jet engine turbines, among other applications.
One of the sources said the two sides “found some ways to loosen up” more challenging areas in critical minerals, but did not provide specifics.
Before the talks, Greer had told CNBC on Friday that the U.S. wanted “to make sure that we continue to get the rare earths we need for our manufacturing base, that they keep buying the kinds of things they should be buying from us, and that the leaders have a chance to get together and make sure that the relationship is going the way we want it to go.”
Greer and Bessent also emphasized in the talks the U.S. desire for China to increase purchases of Boeing jetliners and U.S. coal, oil and natural gas, which could be further discussed on Monday, the sources said.
But with little time to prepare and Washington’s attention focused on the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, prospects for such major trade breakthroughs were limited, in Paris or at the Beijing summit, trade analysts said.
“Given that the leaders may meet up to four times this year, these deliverables maybe can be spread out, rolled out over the year,” said Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator who now heads the Asia Society’s Washington policy center.
These meetings include a potential visit to Washington for Xi, a China-hosted APEC summit in November and a U.S.-hosted G20 summit in December.
(Reporting by David Lawder and Elizabeth Howcroft in Paris and Shi Bu in Beijing; additional reporting by Susan Heavey in Washington; Editing by Diane Craft)
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