Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun. File

| Photo Credit: Reuters

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.Also read | Trump moves toward levying new tariff on China for flooding market with cheap goodsNegotiators 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. Published - September 10, 2026 09:37 pm IST