The Briefing:
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng and lead negotiator Li Chenggang spent roughly eight hours in talks Sunday at JPMorgan Chase's Manhattan headquarters.
- Washington proposed a new US-China AI dialogue built around a notification system for national-security-level incidents; advanced chip and semiconductor equipment export controls stayed off that table.
- The "Board of Trade" mechanism agreed to in May is now formally running, aimed at identifying non-strategic goods eligible for lower tariffs.
- Neither side reported movement on rare earths, nor on the Busan tariff truce, which expires November 10.
- Trump hosts Xi Jinping in Washington on Thursday, the moment that will decide whether this week's groundwork becomes actual policy.
American and Chinese negotiators spent all of Sunday shut inside a conference room JPMorgan Chase lent out in Manhattan, in what turned out to be the final prep session before President Donald Trump welcomes his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to the White House this week. Once the talks wrapped, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters the encounter had been "very successful."
Four names, one room
Sitting alongside Bessent was U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, across the table from Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng and chief negotiator Li Chenggang. It wasn't the four officials' first rodeo: with occasional substitutions, this same group has spent roughly 16 months rotating through cities in Europe and Asia to hash out the details that Trump and Xi later sign off on, a routine that traces back to their first round in Geneva in May 2025.
The headline development was the announcement of a formal channel for the two AI superpowers to discuss risk. Bessent framed it as a way to move past the current opacity between Washington and Beijing through a warning system for incidents serious enough to raise national-security concerns on either side. Greer drew the boundary line: he confirmed that controls on exporting advanced AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment weren't part of this particular conversation, keeping one of the more sensitive fronts of the relationship off the agenda for now.
The Board of Trade is running; rare earths aren't moving
On trade, the outcome was a mixed bag. Greer confirmed the mechanism known as the Board of Trade — created at May's Beijing summit — is now formally operating to flag non-strategic goods for tariff cuts: China's side would likely offer consumer goods and other low-tech items, while Washington would put forward energy, agricultural products and possibly medical equipment. What didn't budge at all was critical minerals. Neither Bessent nor Greer pointed to any progress on rare earths, a grievance Washington has been airing for months with little to show for it.
Sunday's session picked up loose threads left over from Trump's May visit to Beijing, when the White House announced China had committed to buying at least $17 billion a year in American farm goods through 2028, on top of the soybean purchases already locked in back in October 2025. The Boeing figure is worth pinning down precisely: Beijing approved an initial order of 200 Boeing jets — its first from a Chinese airline in nearly a decade — not "more than 200," as some accounts have suggested; Trump floated a figure as high as 750 planes, but neither Boeing nor Beijing has confirmed that number.
The countdown to Washington
With the Manhattan round wrapped, attention now shifts to the U.S. capital, where Xi arrives Thursday for what China's foreign ministry confirmed will be his first state visit since Trump's second term began. Markets had already priced in the conciliatory tone: U.S. stock futures climbed, and by Monday morning in Asia, South Korea's Kospi was up nearly 1.8%, with Samsung Electronics jumping 5%, while Hong Kong's Hang Seng and Shanghai's benchmark both extended gains.
No final numbers on tariffs or purchase volumes came out of Sunday's meeting, so much of the market is still treating the outcome as a goodwill gesture rather than a sealed deal. The real test lands Thursday, when Trump and Xi decide whether eight hours of Manhattan boardroom negotiating turns into actual policy.
