Deputy-Level Groundwork Before a High-Stakes Presidential Meeting
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng are scheduled to sit down on Sunday, tasked with laying the groundwork for what could become formal agreements on artificial intelligence, tariffs, and critical minerals. The meeting is preparatory – designed to narrow differences before President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping hold their own summit in Washington later this week.
That sequencing matters.
Presidential summits between the world’s two largest economies rarely produce breakthroughs without substantial preparation done at the cabinet level first. By sending Bessent and He Lifeng to meet ahead of Trump and Xi, both governments are signaling that Sunday’s conversation is less about ceremony and more about identifying which deals are actually closeable – and which ones need to be quietly set aside before the principals walk into the room.
Three Files on the Table: AI, Tariffs, Critical Minerals
The three agenda items – AI, tariffs, and critical minerals – are not random. Each one represents a pressure point where the US and China have active, unresolved disputes, and where movement in either direction carries significant economic consequences. Together, they form a kind of diplomatic triptych: technology competition, trade costs, and raw material supply chains all addressed in a single negotiating window.
Tariffs are the most politically visible of the three. Since Trump’s return to the White House, the administration has maintained and in some cases extended elevated duties on Chinese goods. Beijing has responded with its own retaliatory measures. Any agreement that adjusts tariff levels – even selectively – would have immediate effects on importers, manufacturers, and consumers on both sides. Bessent, as Treasury Secretary, controls a significant portion of the financial architecture underpinning those trade measures, which makes his presence at the Sunday meeting particularly relevant.
Critical minerals are arguably the longer-term strategic file. China controls processing capacity for a wide range of minerals essential to electric vehicles, defense systems, and semiconductor manufacturing. The US has spent several years attempting to build alternative supply chains through domestic investment and partnerships with allied nations, with limited results so far. A negotiated framework that eases access to Chinese-processed minerals – even partially – would relieve pressure on American manufacturers who currently face tight supply and elevated input costs. Whether Beijing is willing to offer that kind of concession, and at what price, is precisely what Sunday’s meeting is meant to explore.
AI as the New Frontier of US-China Negotiation
Including artificial intelligence in the agenda is the most forward-looking element of Sunday’s talks, and also the most complex. Unlike tariffs, which have established legal and economic frameworks, or critical minerals, which can be addressed through procurement agreements and export licensing, AI governance sits in largely uncharted diplomatic territory. The two governments have not yet developed a shared vocabulary for regulating AI development, deployment, or military application – let alone a framework for negotiating limits on any of those things.
What Bessent and He Lifeng are likely to be working toward is not a comprehensive AI agreement – that would take months or years to negotiate – but rather a set of guardrails or principles that Trump and Xi could announce as a deliverable at their summit. Even a joint statement acknowledging the need for bilateral dialogue on AI safety or export controls would be read by markets and governments worldwide as a meaningful signal. The gap between where the two countries stand on AI competition, however, is wide enough that even this limited goal could prove difficult to reach before the week is out.
For the Trump administration, the AI dimension of these talks also intersects with existing export control policy. The US has restricted the sale of advanced semiconductors to China, limiting Chinese firms’ ability to develop and train cutting-edge AI models. Any discussion of AI in the context of US-China diplomacy inevitably runs into the question of whether those controls could be eased, tightened, or restructured as part of a broader deal – a question that extends well beyond Treasury’s jurisdiction and into the Commerce Department, the Pentagon, and Congress.
What Sunday Actually Decides
Bessent and He Lifeng are not the decision-makers here – Trump and Xi are. But the Sunday meeting determines what options actually reach the presidential level. Issues that cannot be resolved or at least framed as resolvable by Sunday will likely be deferred entirely, emerging instead as agenda items for a future round of talks rather than deliverables at this week’s summit. That makes the Bessent-He conversation a filtering mechanism as much as a negotiation: defining what is possible in Washington this week, and what remains contested.
The location of the summit – Washington, not Beijing or a neutral venue – is itself a diplomatic data point. Hosting Xi at the White House, or at another US venue, signals a degree of engagement the Trump administration has been careful to calibrate. It comes at a moment when US-China relations are defined by simultaneous competition and interdependence, with neither side able to fully decouple from the other despite years of effort to reduce mutual reliance in sensitive sectors.
Whether Sunday’s meeting between Bessent and He Lifeng produces a clean slate of agreed terms or a shorter list of near-agreements surrounded by unresolved disputes will set the temperature for everything that follows. Summits between Trump and Xi have previously generated announcements that later unraveled in implementation – which means the durability of whatever is announced this week will matter as much as the announcement itself.
The critical minerals file, in particular, has a track record of producing framework agreements that stall at the technical level – because what looks like a political deal between two governments often collides with the industrial and regulatory realities of actually moving materials across borders under new terms.
