The US and China reach an agreement, but experts say this is just a pause in the trade war

The agreement reached between President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, calms the trade war between the two countries, but leaves the door open to the possibility of it igniting again.

The agreement represents a year-long truce between the world’s two largest economies, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday as he returned from South Korea, where he and Xi met.

China committed to resuming purchases of US soybeans, which it had suspended earlier this year, and to refrain from restricting US access to rare earth minerals critical to the US high-tech industry. Trump said they also agreed to take steps to eliminate fentanyl production.

In return, the United States will refrain from imposing additional 100% tariffs on Chinese products that Trump threatened, and will reduce tariffs on China to 47%. It also gives China access to American computer chips used in artificial intelligence.

“I thought it was a great meeting,” Trump said.

Specifically, China has agreed to purchase 12 million metric tons of soybeans this year and at least 25 million tons annually in 2026 and 2027, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins posted on social media. China will buy 26.8 million metric tons of soybeans from the United States in 2024, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

Aside from that, few details of the deal had been revealed as of Thursday afternoon. Trump said he would meet with Xi again in April, paving the way for more talks.

If both sides adhere to the agreement, it will amount to a freeze on mutual trade restrictions that each side has recently imposed on the other. However, it would leave key issues unresolved, including the fate of Chinese-owned social media app TikTok, Taiwan’s independence, and “transshipment,” or China evading U.S. tariffs by first shipping products to other countries.

“Today’s progress in US-China trade talks represents an undeniably positive step towards temporarily stabilizing a structurally strained relationship even as major points of tension remain unresolved,” Louise Lu, head of the Department of Asian Economics at Oxford Economics, wrote in a commentary.

Josh Lipsky, head of international economics at the Atlantic Council think tank, said in a blog post that the deal’s provisions “take us back to where we were before the trade wars between the United States and China in the spring.” China still faces higher tariffs than when Trump took office.

Reed and other experts noted that China was able to leverage its dominance of rare earth minerals to extract concessions from the United States, and predicted that it would likely do so again in the future.