Tariff relief on paper, rivalry intact in practice

The latest US-China trade move has all the charm of a filing cabinet, which is to say it is orderly, cautious and unlikely to transform much. After last week’s summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, both governments released lists of goods recommended for lower tariffs, a step tied to their pledge to work toward reducing duties on $60bn of bilateral trade.

The numbers are tidy. The arrangement covers $30bn of imports on each side, with 77 Chinese goods and more than 1,600 US products put forward for more favourable treatment. China’s list includes microwave ovens, fish hooks, artificial flowers and weighing scales. The American side has identified poultry, dairy products, noodles, eggs, peanuts, canned tomatoes, pure-breed breeding horses and silk. It is a broad enough assortment to suggest movement and a narrow enough one to avoid any real drama.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the deal would improve market access for about 30 percent of US exports to China and benefit US consumers. In a statement, he said the Trump administration would continue to pursue fair, balanced and reciprocal trade with China while enforcing commitments on agricultural and energy purchases and securing access for American farmers, manufacturers, businesses and workers. China’s Ministry of Commerce, which confirmed the list on Monday, said the two sides would discuss a reciprocal tariff-reduction framework of $30 billion for $30 billion with the aim of reaching a consensus.

Beijing also said the arrangement would help stabilise China-US trade, create better conditions for Chinese exports of relevant products to the US, meet domestic market demand and strengthen cooperation in agricultural products, energy, manufactured goods and consumer goods. All perfectly respectable language, naturally, though it does tend to appear when the substance is still being negotiated.

That is the larger point. Trump and Xi ended their talks on Friday with pomp and ceremony, but with few concrete announcements on the many divisions between the two powers, from trade to artificial intelligence and Taiwan. They have now held three face-to-face summits since last October, and they are expected to meet again at the APEC summit in Shenzhen in November and at the G20 gathering in Miami in December.

The trade backdrop remains grim enough to make these lists look more like selective housekeeping than a reset. According to the US Trade Representative, two-way trade totalled $495bn in 2025, down 25 percent from the previous year, after Trump returned to the White House in January last year. Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation in Singapore, said the latest announcement did not point to a major shift in US-China trade.

Instead, she said, both sides had largely listed goods that do not move the needle on overall trade flows. Some prices in the US may ease a little, but not enough to alter inflation figures in any meaningful way or produce much relief for most buyers. The same, she added, is broadly true on the Chinese side: many of the agricultural products on the list are not actually exported to China, or not in significant quantities. So the tariff cuts may exist, but the grand trade thaw remains, as ever, a promise with paperwork.

Written by Martina Kirchner martina.kirchner@alpineweekly.com