In their first in-person meeting in six years, the United States President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping met on Thursday 30 October in Busan, South Korea, in a high-stakes summit that took place in an atmosphere of growing tension in American-Chinese relations amidst something approaching a trade war.
It was the first meeting between the two leaders since President Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the US in January this year for his second term. In the first term, from 2017-2021, President Trump had invited the Chinese president to his Florida Mar-a-Lago home in April 2017 in an encounter that aimed at opening a new chapter in Sino-American relations.
In the interlude between the first and second terms came the Joe Biden years that witnessed a certain regression in relations between China and the US that the Biden administration tried to keep from worsening against major geo-strategic questions in the Asia-Pacific region such as Taiwan, the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea and the growing strategic alliance between China and Russia, particularly after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February 2022.
It was expected that the Busan Summit would be an attempt by both sides to smooth over their different perspectives in this regard, however, the summit centred on trade issues. Judging the summit meeting between the presidents of China and the United States in South Korea from this angle, I guess the meeting was a success.
The two leaders demonstrated a shared political will to contain the fallout from their tariffs war through the imposition of prohibitive tariffs on the part of the American administration and export controls on rare earth minerals on the Chinese side. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in an interview published in the weekend edition of the Financial Times last week, described the situation as tantamount to a “trade war”. Bessent added that the summit helped reach an “agreement equilibrium”, and that both countries could operate within the context of this equilibrium over the next 12 months.
The two countries agreed that China would postpone its rare earths regimen of export controls to buy large amounts of American soybeans – at least 25 million tons annually for the next three years – in addition to buying sorghum and other American farm products, and allow American investors to take control of TikTok in the US. Moreover, and in a major concession to President Trump, President Xi committed to cracking down on the export of chemicals used to make the deadly opioid fentanyl. That commitment led Trump to cut fentanyl-related tariffs from 20 per cent to 10 per cent. Secretary Bessent told the Financial Times that a lot of the discussions in Busan centred around the question of fentanyl, for it was a very important issue for the Trump administration and the American people.
Commenting on the summit, Bessent opined that the two leaders realised that “stability” between the two countries was important for their respective economies as well as for the global economy. He said he believed that the Chinese president clearly wanted to find areas of cooperation with President Trump.
En route back to the US from Busan and the first Asian tour in his second term, President Trump described the trade deal as a “long-lasting victory”. He also called his meeting with President Xi a “blockbuster” for American farmers, and hinted at stronger trade ties with China in the future. On the other hand, he believed that he got along “very well” with President Xi.
In the Busan Summit, it was agreed that President Trump would visit China next April, and that President Xi would travel to the US before the end of 2026.
The summit succeeded in averting major escalation in a tariffs war between the United States and China and led to a promising trade deal for the next 12 months. Hopefully, the two giants would strive to maintain the momentum generated by the results of the summit and build on it by transforming the 12-month pause into more solid trade agreements. However, geo-strategic differences remain to be discussed in depth in the near future.
Uncertainties remain in this regard. After the conclusion of the Busan Summit, the American Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, before a meeting of the defence ministers of ASEAN on Friday 31 October, accused China of “unlawfully claiming jurisdiction over waters that are not theirs”, and was attempting to regulate and limit peaceful military activities by other nations, adding – in a not very subtle way – that “we must ensure that China is not seeking to dominate you or anybody else.”
I am not sure that Hegseth’s alarming message was well-received by the ASEAN defence ministers whose countries have made it amply clear that they have no interest in taking sides in the Sino-American rivalry.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 6 November, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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