Trump hails ‘great progress’ at US-China trade talks in Geneva

China-US talks: US President Donald Trump said the two sides had negotiated "a total reset". Keystone-SDA

US President Donald Trump on Saturday welcomed the "great progress" made at talks between the US and China in Geneva on tariffs, saying the two sides had negotiated "a total reset... in a friendly, but constructive, manner”.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

“A very good meeting today with China, in Switzerland. Many things discussed, much agreed to,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.

Trump added: “We want to see, for the good of both China and the U.S., an opening up of China to American business. GREAT PROGRESS MADE!!!” He did not elaborate on the progress.

Talks between China and the US, which began on Saturday morning in a luxury villa in Geneva in an attempt to resolve the trade war between the two countries, were suspended in the evening and resumed on Sunday morning.

In a sign of the importance of what is at stake, both capitals sent high-ranking representatives to Geneva this weekend for the talks: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng.

“The contact established in Switzerland is an important step in promoting the resolution of the dispute,” said the official New China press agency ahead of the meeting, without providing any further details on the progress of the negotiations.

Since his return to the White House in January, Trump has turned tariffs into a political weapon. He has imposed a 145% tariff on goods from China, in addition to pre-existing tariffs.

Beijing, which has promised to fight Donald Trump’s surcharges “to the bitter end”, retaliated with 125% tariffs on American products.

As a result, bilateral trade has virtually ground to a halt and the markets have experienced violent upheavals.

On Friday, Trump made a gesture by suggesting lowering to 80% the punitive tariffs that he himself had imposed on Chinese products.

“The president would like to settle the issue with China. As he said, he would like to calm the situation,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick assured Fox News on Friday evening.

The gesture remains symbolic, as tariffs at this level would still be unbearable for most Chinese exports to the United States.

The discussions in Geneva are therefore “a positive and constructive step towards de-escalation”, according to the Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala on the eve of the talks.

In mid-April, she had expressed “great concern”. She said that even though China-US trade “only represents around 3% of world merchandise trade, a decoupling” of these two major economies “could have considerable consequences”. The world economy would then be organised “along geopolitical lines into two isolated blocs”.

The Chinese Vice-Premier seemed to arrive in Geneva with an advantage: on Friday, Beijing announced an 8.1% jump in its exports in April, a figure four times higher than analysts’ forecasts, but exports to the United States fell by almost 18%.

Donald Trump “is not going to unilaterally lower tariffs on China. We also need to see concessions from them”, warned his spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt.

“One possible outcome of the talks in Switzerland would be an agreement to suspend most, if not all, of the tariffs imposed this year for the duration of the bilateral negotiations”, Bonnie Glaser, who heads the Indo-Pacific programme of the German Marshall Fund, a think tank in Washington, told the AFP news agency.

Xu Bin, a professor at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai, does not expect tariffs to return to a “reasonable level”: “Even if it comes down, it will probably be by half, and, again, it will be too high to have normal trade.”

Translated from French by DeepL/sb

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

Did you find this explanation helpful? Please fill out the short survey below to help us understand your needs.

Don’t miss your chance to make a difference! Take our survey and share your thoughts.