China hits back at Trump, saying U.S. actions ‘severely undermine’ trade truce

HONG KONG — China on Monday accused the United States of breaching the 90-day trade truce agreed by the world’s two largest economies, after President Donald Trump said it was Beijing that had “totally violated” the agreement.

Last month, the U.S. and China announced a 90-day pause on most of their tit-for-tat tariffs, which had reached higher than 100%. Trump initially hailed the truce as a “total reset” but said Friday in a post on his Truth Social platform that China had “TOTALLY VIOLATED” the deal.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce struck back at Trump’s remarks Monday, saying that while China had implemented and actively upheld the deal, the U.S. had introduced a series of “discriminatory and restrictive measures against China” that “severely undermine” the agreement.

The ministry said those measures included AI chip export controls, a reported pause on the sale of chip design software to China, and the announcement of U.S. plans to revoke the visas of Chinese students.

“Instead of reflecting on its own actions, it has falsely accused China of violating the consensus, which is a serious distortion of the facts,” the ministry said in a statement. “China firmly rejects these groundless accusations.”

The ministry urged the U.S. to “immediately correct its erroneous practices” and vowed to take “strong and resolute” measures if Washington “insists on acting unilaterally and continues to harm China’s interests,” without providing details.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that China was “holding back” exports of rare earths that it had agreed to release as part of the truce.

“That is not what a reliable partner does,” he said on the CBS news program “Face the Nation.”

Rare earth minerals are a crucial component of products that cut across the U.S. economy, including the tech sector, the energy industry and automobile manufacturing.

China supplies 60% of the world’s rare earth elements and is responsible for the refining of 90% of them, according to the International Energy Agency.

Bessent, who said last week that U.S.-China trade talks were “a bit stalled,” said he was “confident” that rare earths exports and other details could be “ironed out” in a call between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“Maybe it’s a glitch in the Chinese system, maybe it’s intentional. We’ll see after the president speaks with the party chairman,” Bessent said, referring to Xi.

Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, also suggested Sunday that the two leaders could speak as early as this week.

“President Trump, we expect, is going to have a wonderful conversation about the trade negotiations this week with President Xi,” he said on the ABC news program “This Week.”

Hassett said he was unsure whether a specific date for that conversation had been set.

The last publicly known conversation between the U.S. and Chinese presidents was on Jan. 17, days before Trump’s inauguration.