Trump and Xi hold long-awaited trade call

By Kevin Liptak and Simone McCarthy, CNN

Washington/Hong Kong (CNN) — President Donald Trump held a long-awaited phone call Thursday with China’s Xi Jinping, a person familiar with the matter said, as the two leaders tussle over trade policy.

The White House did not immediately confirm the call, which was also reported by Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

The call comes after a long period of silence between the leaders, and the discrepancy in how each side was talking — or not talking — about the call ahead of time only underscored a widening gulf between the world’s two largest economies.

Tensions have been rising between the two sides in the weeks after they agreed to a 90-day trade truce last month, which hit pause on their tit-for-tat escalation of tariffs. Trump last week accused China of “violating” the agreement — a charge Beijing has denied, while it accused the US of taking steps to “seriously undermine” that consensus.

US officials had signaled in recent days that a call between the two leaders could help jump-start progress in expected upcoming trade talks, which had appeared to stall following the initial truce reached in Geneva.

As CNN reported ahead of Thursday’s call, Chinese officials — who were deeply wary of Trump’s unpredictability and track record of putting foreign leaders in awkward or embarrassing situations — had put off a phone call, according to people familiar, even as Trump stated on multiple occasions this spring that he expected to speak with Xi soon.

The president’s Oval Office ambushes of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa caught the attention of officials in China, those people added, and officials wanted to avoid anything similar, even in a private conversation.

But Trump regards securing a new agreement with Beijing both as a critical component of his broader trade agenda and as a necessary follow-up from his first term, when trade deals with China got derailed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The two leaders are known to have last spoken on January 17, days before Trump’s inauguration. They are navigating a fractious relationship, with recent points of contention stretching beyond their gaping trade imbalance.

Following the Geneva talks last month, US officials had expected China to ease export restrictions on rare earth minerals, which had been imposed in April in retaliation against Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs on Chinese goods. The minerals are an essential part of everything from iPhones and electric vehicles to big-ticket weapons like F-35 fighter jets and missile systems.

But the restrictions haven’t been lifted, causing intense displeasure inside the Trump administration and prompting a recent series of measures imposed on China, three administration officials told CNN last week.

Beijing, meanwhile, has bristled as Washington warned companies against using AI chips made by China’s national tech champion Huawei, moved to limit critical technology sales to China and announced that the US would “aggressively revoke visas” for Chinese students in the US with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.

This is story has been updated with additional information.

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