China and the U.S. hope to reach an agreement on lowering import taxes soon, a Chinese government spokesperson said Thursday (September 10, 2026), fuelling expectations that an announcement could come when the leaders of the two countries meet in two weeks.

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Negotiators are striving to implement reciprocal tariff reductions on $30 billion of goods “at an early date”, Commerce Ministry spokesperson Huang Ling said at a weekly briefing.

She did not elaborate. U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to meet in Washington on September 24 for what will be their third face-to-face talks in the past year. Both governments characterise the top leader talks as a way to stabilise relations in an era of competing interests between the world’s two largest economies.

“Leaders’ diplomacy plays an irreplaceable strategic guiding role in China-U.S. relations,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said Thursday (September 10).

Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi agreed at their previous meeting in May in Beijing to launch a U.S.-China Board of Trade that would manage trade between the two countries, along with a parallel Board of Investment.

The agreements came after a truce was reached in a blistering tariff war in which Mr. Trump hiked tariffs on Chinese imports to extremely high levels and China responded in kind.

The talks on reciprocal tariff reductions are a central part of the negotiations on creating the Board of Trade. The goal is to identify and reduce tariffs on equivalent amounts of “non-sensitive” goods on each side.

“Trade will be front and centre at the summit,” Barclays Bank said in a research note this week on the upcoming Trump-Xi meeting, noting that the truce the two countries reached on tariffs expires on Nov 10. But it cautioned that the scope for a broad trade deal is limited, and that targeted tariff reductions are more likely.

China launched two probes targeting the U.S. semiconductor sector on Saturday (September 13, 2025) ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok.

China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog IC chips imported from the U.S. The investigation will target some commodity interface IC chips and gate driver IC chips, which are commonly made by U.S. companies such as Texas Instruments and ON Semiconductor.

The Ministry separately announced an anti-discrimination probe into U.S. measures against China’s chip sector.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is set to meet Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Madrid between Sunday and Wednesday, He’s office said.

U.S. measures such as export curbs and tariffs “constitute the containment and suppression of China’s development of high-tech industries” such as advanced computer chips and artificial intelligence, a Chinese commerce ministry spokesperson said.

The announcements of the probes follow the U.S. on Friday adding 23 Chinese companies to an “entity list” of businesses that will face restrictions for allegedly acting against U.S. national security and foreign policy interests. The list includes two Chinese companies accused of acquiring chipmaking equipment for major Chinese chipmaker SMIC.

The meetings between Bessent and He in Madrid will be the latest in a series of negotiations aimed at reducing trade tensions and postponing the enactment of higher tariffs on each other’s goods.

U.S. and Chinese counterparts previously held discussions in Geneva in May, London in June and Stockholm in July. The two governments have agreed to several 90-day pauses on a series of increasing reciprocal tariffs, staving off an all-out trade war.

Mr. Bessent described the talks during the last round in Stockholm as “very fulsome.” “We just need to de-risk with certain, strategic industries, whether it’s the rare earths, semiconductors, medicines, and we talked about what we could do together to get into balance within the relationship,” Mr. Bessent said at the time.

U.S. President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden placed curbs on China’s access to advanced semiconductors including restrictions on the sale of chipmaking equipment to the country. While Washington cites national security concerns, China argues the curbs are part of a U.S. strategy to contain its growth.