US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke by phone Thursday, and plan to hold trade talks soon, Trump said.
The US president wrote in a post on Truth Social that the call lasted one and half hours, and focused exclusively on trade. He added that a US delegation led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent would meet with a Chinese team for negotiations “shortly,” and that both leaders extended invitations to visit each other’s countries. The Chinese state news agency Xinhua said the call was initiated at Washington’s request.
The talks come amid persistent tension between the world’s two largest economies, and after Trump posted Wednesday that the Chinese leader was “extremely hard to make a deal with.”
The phone call is the first time that Trump and Xi are confirmed to have spoken since the US leader’s return to office in January. Since then, the pair had slapped huge tariffs on each other, before agreeing a truce last month.