Trump Negotiates With China on Trade While Other Officials Warn of War

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump spoke on the phone with Chinese leader Xi Jinping Thursday amid tense relations over trade and concerns about war in Taiwan.

Tensions over trade escalated after Trump declared high tariffs on countries worldwide shortly after being inaugurated in January. Some of the highest were imposed on China, which quickly responded by increasing tariffs on U.S. exports.

The United States and China agreed to pause the tariffs last month but Trump is threatening to reinstate them unless he wins concessions on trade exchanges within weeks.

He said on his social media site Truth Social Thursday that the hour-and-a-half-long phone call with Xi produced “very good” results on trade policy, particularly on China’s exports of rare earth minerals.

China dominates the world market for rare earth minerals. They are used in high-tech components of many consumer products, such as cellphones and cars.

The United States has accused China of violating trade agreements that put restrictions on exports of the minerals.

“There should no longer be any questions respecting the complexity of Rare Earth products,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after the phone call.

Further trade negotiations are planned, he said.

“The conversation was focused almost entirely on TRADE,” Trump wrote, which is far different than what other members of his administration have been saying about China in the past week.

They are saying China’s threats against U.S. ally Taiwan could easily spill over to military conflict with the United States.

The warnings came this week from FBI Director Kash Patel and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Patel said the arrests of two Chinese nationals accused of smuggling a dangerous biological pathogen into the United States are a “sobering reminder” of Chinese efforts to infiltrate U.S. institutions.

Yunqing Jian, 33, and Zunyong Liu, 34, are awaiting trial for allegedly smuggling Fusarium graminearum, a fungus that can devastate several crops, into the United States.

The U.S. government classifies Fusarium graminearum as a potential agroterrorism weapon because it can cause “head blight” in crops like wheat, rice and corn. The United States is the world’s top exporter of corn and ranks in the top five for wheat, meaning the economic consequences of widespread head blight could be severe.

In addition, toxins in the fungus can cause vomiting, liver damage and reproductive defects in humans and livestock.

“’Smuggling a known agroterrorism agent into the U.S. is not just a violation of law, it’s a direct threat to national security,” Patel said in a statement.

Hegseth gave similar warnings Saturday at the Shangri-La Dialogue, a global security conference in Singapore.

China’s military “is rehearsing for the real deal” against Taiwan, Hegseth said. “We are not going to sugarcoat it. The threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent.”

Taiwan is one of several territories China claims as its own in the South China Sea that are now under control of other countries. The Chinese government has pledged to reclaim Taiwan by 2027, even if it requires use of force.

Hegseth urged U.S. allies like Australia and the Philippines to increase their defenses against a potential Chinese attack. He also said the United States would support its allies in the region.

China responded by accusing the United States of saber-rattling but declined to back down from its claims of sovereignty over Taiwan.

“Hegseth deliberately ignored the call for peace and development by countries in the region, and instead touted the Cold War mentality for bloc confrontation, vilified China with defamatory allegations, and falsely called China a ‘threat,'” a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement said.

It added, “The U.S. must never play with fire on this question. China urges the U.S. to fully abide by the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. joint communiques, and stop supporting and emboldening the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces.”

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