Bessent and Greer to meet with Chinese trade official in Switzerland

President Donald Trump’s top trade officials will hold face-to-face trade talks this weekend with a Chinese economic official for the first time since the U.S. imposed punishing tariffs on China and set off a global trade war.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will meet in Geneva on Saturday and Sunday with Vice Premier He Lifeng, a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling Politburo and China’s top economic official.

The weeks of stalemate over whether the U.S. or China would make the first move toward easing trade tensions spilled over into how the U.S. and Chinese explained the motivation for the meeting.

In a face-saving gesture, both sides attempted to portray the high-level meeting as coincidence of the top officials being in Geneva at the same time.

“I was going to be in Switzerland to negotiate with the Swiss,” Bessent said in an interview on Fox News. “Turns out the Chinese team is traveling through Europe, and they will be in Switzerland also. So we will meet on Saturday and Sunday.”

For its part, China’s press release said He would be in Geneva at the invitation of the Swiss government. The setting presents a neutral location for the countries to try to ratchet down trade tensions. Geneva is also the home of the World Trade Organization, making it the symbolic center of the increasingly stressed rules-based global trading system.

Bessent sought to downplay expectations that the two sides would start talks on a comprehensive trade deal at this weekend’s meeting, something that trade experts expect would involve a lengthy negotiation.

However, they could discuss how to de-escalate from the 145 percent tariffs that Trump has imposed on all Chinese goods and Beijing’s 125 percent retaliatory tariffs on American goods, he said.

“This isn’t sustainable, as I said before, especially on the Chinese side,” Bessent said. The current tariffs are “the equivalent of an embargo. We don’t want to decouple. What we want is fair trade.”

Bessent was evasive when Fox host Laura Ingraham asked which side made the first call to arrange the meeting. “There are lots of calls… There isn’t a first call. There are a lot of contact points over time,” he said.

He also declined to say whether Trump would offer to lower his tariff to 50 percent as a sign of good faith. But “everything’s on the table” and Trump himself will decide what to do, Bessent added.

The Chinese press release did not specifically say that He would meet with Greer as well as Bessent, but the timing of the trip suggested he would. USTR has historically been the lead for U.S. trade negotiations, but the Trump administration has broken that mold.

“At President Trump’s direction, I am negotiating with countries to rebalance our trade relations to achieve reciprocity, open new markets and protect America’s economic and national security,” Greer said in a statement. “I look forward to having productive meetings with some of my counterparts, as well as visiting with my team in Geneva who all work diligently to advance U.S. interests on a range of multilateral issues.”

The meeting comes as both the Trump administration and Chinese officials have indicated that there may be room for some negotiations.

“Our doors are open if the U.S. wants to talk,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said Tuesday. But he made clear that the Trump administration’s narrative of compelling trading partners to the negotiation table won’t work with Beijing. “If a negotiated solution is truly what the U.S. wants, it should stop threatening and exerting pressure,” Lin added.

The weekend meeting could serve as an opening salvo in talks that would lower what has effectively become a trade embargo between the two countries. Already, businesses are warning of higher prices as imports to the West Coast have plunged to levels not seen since the early days of the Covid pandemic.

Phelim Kine and Ari Hawkins contributed to this report.