{"id":903604,"date":"2026-09-21T03:06:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T03:06:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/903604\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T03:06:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T03:06:20","slug":"bessent-meets-chinese-vice-premier-for-talks-on-ai-trade-and-critical-minerals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/903604\/","title":{"rendered":"Bessent meets Chinese Vice Premier for talks on AI, trade and critical minerals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Paris in March.The U.S. Treasury\/Reuters<\/p>\n

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese<\/a> Vice Premier He Lifeng arrived in New York on Sunday for a meeting aimed at teeing up potential agreements on AI, tariffs and critical minerals for a high-stakes summit this week between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.<\/p>\n

The meetings at JP Morgan Chase\u2019s headquarters in Manhattan, which will also include U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, started shortly after Bessent\u2019s arrival around 10:30 a.m. and were expected to run all day.<\/p>\n

Before heading into the meeting, Bessent told reporters that he looked forward to \u201cfocused, fulsome and constructive talks\u201d that would pave the way for the coming Trump-Xi summit in Washington.<\/p>\n

Key topics will be a US-China trade truce that is set to expire on Nov. 10, flows of Chinese rare-earth magnets and critical minerals that U.S. officials say are insufficient and potential guard rails for artificial intelligence after reports of security breaches involving AI models.<\/p>\n

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The most likely outcome, analysts say, would be for Washington and Beijing to agree on small steps to show they are continuing to avoid escalating tensions in a delicate trade relationship that has major consequences for the global economy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there will be some show of deliverables because of the fact that it\u2019s a presidential summit coming, but I don\u2019t feel like we\u2019re on the verge of some sort of breakthrough,\u201d said Anna Ashton, a China trade analyst and founder of Ashton Intelligence. \u201cI think status quo is probably both sides\u2019 general best expectation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of the issues that He, Bessent and Greer will have to work through for Trump and Xi are holdovers from the two leaders\u2019 May meeting in Beijing, including an effort on both sides to cut tariffs on non-strategic goods and Chinese pledges to increase purchases of U.S. agricultural goods by US$17-billion a year and to purchase more than 200 Boeing aircraft.<\/p>\n

The Bessent-He-Greer meeting follows a pattern set over the past 16 months, in which the three officials met in European and Asian cities to tee up potential agreements for Trump and Xi.<\/p>\n

These efforts included the November 2025 truce reached in Busan, South Korea, which capped U.S. tariffs imposed by Trump on Chinese goods at about 20 per cent after tit-for-tat escalation had brought them to triple-digit levels on both sides.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Supreme Court later struck down the Trump tariffs that were invoked under a national emergencies law, including duties related to fentanyl trafficking.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s administration has been rebuilding them under new authorities, including restoration of a 12.5 per cent tariff on Chinese goods over forced labour allegations. It is finalizing a separate tariff investigation aimed at curbing excess industrial capacity that it says is rampant in China.<\/p>\n

Under that truce, China promised to restore the flow of critical minerals to U.S. and global users. However, a senior U.S. official told reporters on Friday that China\u2019s performance on that front \u201chas not been up to par\u201d and would be a topic for discussion ahead of the Trump-Xi summit.<\/p>\n

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The Bessent-He discussions on AI are significant because the U.S. and China are the two major forces driving development of advanced AI tools and global adoption of the technology. Rare earths play a crucial role in the manufacturing of advanced semiconductor technology powering AI.<\/p>\n

Bessent said on Friday that he expects the discussions to cover \u201cboth open and closed-weight models.\u201d Open-weight models are AI systems with publicly accessible core elements where users can download and fine-tune them for specific tasks.<\/p>\n

Chinese open-weight models are becoming more popular with U.S. companies because they can be cheaper than closed-weight AI tools such as those developed by Anthropic, OpenAI and other U.S. companies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe United States remains the leader in AI. And we are open to discussions on avoiding shared risks and avoiding bifurcation of our two systems,\u201d Bessent said in a statement on the China talks.<\/p>\n

Bessent has called for the U.S. and China to agree on AI \u201cguard rails\u201d aimed at keeping powerful models out of the hands of malign non-state actors.<\/p>\n

Trump and Xi must reach a deal that covers AI safety, said U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, the ranking Democrat on the U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first ask is of Trump and Xi Jinping to come up with an international agreement, and two of the core principles should be one banning any self-improving AI, recursive self-improving AI. \u2026 The second is to have safeguards so that AI can\u2019t be misused by people for biological nuclear weapons,\u201d Khanna said on Sunday, speaking on CBS.<\/p>\n

The U.S. and China also agreed in May to launch discussions to reduce tariffs for non-strategic goods under a so-called \u201cBoard of Trade\u201d mechanism along with a similar forum to deal with specific investment issues.<\/p>\n

While the Trump administration has tightened restrictions on U.S. companies investing in some industries in China, Reuters reported on Friday that it is working on rules likely to allow U.S. pharmaceutical companies to invest in promising Chinese drugs and strike licensing deals for them.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s Ministry of Commerce said on Saturday that He would also lead a delegation of Chinese companies to the U.S. that would participate in economic and trade consultations ahead of the summit.<\/p>\n

The business delegation, which mirrors a group of U.S. CEOs that Trump brought to Beijing in May, was announced as Trump expressed openness to Chinese automakers building U.S. factories.<\/p>\n

US auto industry groups on Friday urged Trump to maintain an effective ban on Chinese vehicle sales in the U.S. on national security grounds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Paris…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":903605,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,901,276,277,888,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,875,46,549,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":["post-903604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-alberta","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-arts-news","tag-bc","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-british-columbia","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canada-news","tag-canada-sports","tag-canada-sports-news","tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","tag-canadian-breaking-news","tag-canadian-news","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-environment","tag-federal-government","tag-foreign-news","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","tag-government","tag-life-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-local-news","tag-manitoba","tag-national-news","tag-new-brunswick","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","tag-northwest-territories","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nunavut","tag-ontario","tag-pei","tag-photos","tag-political-news","tag-political-opinion","tag-politics","tag-politics-news","tag-quebec","tag-sports-news","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-trudeau","tag-us-news","tag-world-news","tag-yukon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=903604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903604\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/903605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=903604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=903604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=903604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}