US delegation to be led by Treasury and Commerce secretaries Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick along with top trade representative Jamieson Greer.
US President
Donald Trump
announced on Friday that his top economic officials will meet with their Chinese counterparts next week to discuss trade, just days after he conducted a phone call with Chinese President
Xi Jinping
, and also reiterated that Beijing agreed to restart exports of critical minerals.
“I am pleased to announce that Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, and United States Trade Representative, Ambassador Jamieson Greer, will be meeting in London on Monday, June 9, 2025, with Representatives of China, with reference to the Trade Deal,” Trump said on
social media
.
“The meeting should go very well. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
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Already buoyed by a US jobs report on Friday that narrowly exceeded forecasts, stocks extended gains after Trump’s announcement, with the benchmark
S&P 500
index advancing by more than 1 per cent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index gaining around 1.3 per cent.
The talks planned for next week will come just four days after Trump held a phone call with Xi to discuss a frayed trading relationship before extending invitations to visit each other’s capitals.
Trump said shortly after the call on Thursday that the exchange “resulted in a very positive conclusion for both Countries”.
Trump’s positive tone marks a change from the accusations that Washington and Beijing had flung at each other in the days leading up to this week’s phone conversation for allegedly breaching a deal reached weeks ago in Geneva, when the world’s two largest economies agreed to
dramatically cut mutual tariffs for 90 days
.
Beijing’s embassy in Washington declined to comment when asked for confirmation of the meeting.
While China has not mentioned rare earth minerals in any of its messaging since Thursday’s call between the two leaders, Trump said “yes, he did” when White House reporters asked him later on Friday if Xi agreed “to restart the flow of rare earth minerals and magnets”.
Around 90 per cent of the world’s supply of rare earth minerals comes from China, which introduced export controls on their shipments in April in retaliation to Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs.
Rare earths consist of 17 elements. On April 4, Beijing added seven of these – dysprosium, gadolinium, lutetium, samarium, scandium, terbium and yttrium – to its export control list, plus several rare earth magnets, two days after Trump announced “reciprocal tariffs”, meaning licenses are now required for their export.
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This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.
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