China and the US hope to reach an agreement to lower import taxes soon, a Chinese government spokesperson said on Thursday, fuelling expectations that an announcement could come when the two countries’ leaders meet in two weeks.Negotiators are striving to implement reciprocal tariff reductions on $30bn worth of goods “at an early date”, commerce ministry spokesperson Huang Ling said at a weekly briefing.The $30bn will be from each side, China’s official Xinhua News Agency said.Leaders’ diplomacy plays an irreplaceable strategic guiding role in China-US relations— Guo Jiakun, Chinese foreign ministry spokespersonUS president Donald Trump and Chinese leader 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 meetings 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-US relations,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said on Thursday.Trump and Xi agreed at their previous meeting in May in Beijing to launch a US-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 Trump hiked tariffs on Chinese imports to extremely high levels, and China responded in kind.Talks on reciprocal tariff reductions are central to negotiations to create the trade board. The goal is to identify and reduce tariffs on equivalent amounts of “nonsensitive” goods on each side, the US said.“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 November 10. But it cautioned that the scope for a broad trade deal is limited and that targeted tariff reductions are more likely.But as the US and China have already reduced mutual trade reliance, the “overall trade significance will be more limited than before, given the smaller bilateral volume”, said Gary Ng, a senior economist at French bank Natixis.Chinese exports to the US, for example, fell sharply last year, after the US rolled out elevated tariffs.An agreement on reciprocal tariff reductions could likely benefit the US more, as $30bn is roughly 28% of its exports to China, while it is only about 10% the other way around, Ng said.AP