(Bloomberg) - Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he still expects Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping will meet, while warning that all options are open for retaliating against China’s move to tighten exports of rare earths.
“He will be meeting with party chair Xi in Korea — I believe that meeting will still be on,” Bessent said on Fox Business Monday. He added that there had been “substantial communication” over the weekend, after Beijing had failed to respond to US inquiries, apparently referring to questions the administration had over China’s rare earths decision last week.
That decision, involving wide-ranging global export controls on products containing even traces of certain rare earths, prompted Trump to fire back on Friday, by threatening to cancel his planned meeting with Xi at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea late this month. The president also announced plans to put an additional 100% tariff on Chinese goods starting Nov. 1.
“He will be meeting with party chair Xi in Korea — I believe that meeting will still be on,” Bessent said on Fox Business Monday. He added that there had been “substantial communication” over the weekend, after Beijing had failed to respond to US inquiries, apparently referring to questions the administration had over China’s rare earths decision last week.
That decision, involving wide-ranging global export controls on products containing even traces of certain rare earths, prompted Trump to fire back on Friday, by threatening to cancel his planned meeting with Xi at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea late this month. The president also announced plans to put an additional 100% tariff on Chinese goods starting Nov. 1.
He said that he himself expects to meet with China’s vice premier “in Asia” before the Trump-Xi encounter. Bessent’s counterpart in multiple rounds of trade talks this year has been Vice Premier He Lifeng.
Asked about what the US might use as leverage to help force China to back down on its controls, Bessent said that “everything’s on the table,” while adding that he was “optimistic that this can be de-escalated.”
“But we’re willing to do whatever it takes and to adopt whatever posture it takes,” he said. “As President Trump says, we do have more cards, whether it’s on software, whether it’s on minerals, whether it’s on financial services.”
US Leverage
Among the points of US leverage, Bessent cited 12 “countermeasures” employed early this summer, from natural resources used in the making of plastics, to jet engines and parts. “We have plenty of straight brute-force countermeasures we can pull,” he said, also citing the hundreds of thousands of Chinese students studing in the US.
There are multiple potential motivations for China to have taken last week’s step, including “a mistaken attempt to try to gain leverage” before the Trump-Xi meeting, Bessent said. “I believe that the president thinks that this may have been from a lower-level official,” he added. “This may have come from a Chinese hard-liner. They have hard-liners on their side too, who are always trying to undermine the relationship.”
“It was a miscalculation, but we are communicating now — I am confident that we can move forward,” Bessent said.
