PARIS — Senior U.S. and Chinese trade officials opened a tense new negotiating round Sunday aimed at preserving a fragile truce and narrowing what Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping might announce when they meet in Beijing later this month, March 15, 2026. The Paris sessions matter because both governments are trying to keep tariffs, export controls and supply-chain pressure from tipping back into a fresh escalation.
In a U.S. Treasury announcement, Washington said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent would meet Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Paris on March 15-16. Beijing, in a March 13 government statement, said He’s delegation would be in France from March 14-17 for what it described as the sixth round of China-U.S. economic and trade talks.
Why the US-China trade talks in Paris matter
Reuters reported that the immediate agenda includes tariffs, Chinese rare earth shipments and magnets, U.S. high-tech export controls, and Chinese purchases of American farm goods. Those are the same pressure points that have kept the relationship commercially intertwined but politically brittle, with Washington pressing for more balanced trade and Beijing seeking fewer technology curbs and a steadier tariff path.
The calendar is tight. AP reported that Trump’s state visit to Beijing is due to begin March 31, leaving negotiators little time to convert broad talking points into deliverables that both leaders can sell at home. That makes Paris less a venue for a grand bargain than a test of whether both sides can define a narrow package big enough to show momentum and small enough to survive the politics on each side.
The meetings are also opening under a fresh cloud. Just before the Paris round, China criticized new U.S. trade probes tied to industrial overcapacity and forced labor, warning that it reserved the right to respond. That dispute raises the risk that even a carefully managed summit agenda could be complicated by new tariff threats before the leaders sit down.
How earlier US-China trade talks set up the Paris round
Paris is not a fresh start. The confrontation sharpened when China hit back at U.S. tariffs with export controls on key rare earths in April 2025, putting direct pressure on manufacturers and defense-linked supply chains that depend on Chinese processing capacity.
A month later, Washington and Beijing agreed to roll back most tariffs for 90 days, an important pause that lowered the temperature without resolving the deeper fights over subsidies, market access, technology restrictions and industrial policy.
The clearest immediate precursor to Paris was the October 2025 Busan summit truce, which paired modest tariff relief with renewed Chinese soybean buying and a one-year suspension of some rare earth export curbs. Paris is now a measure of whether that tactical truce can be turned into something more durable — or whether both sides are merely buying time before the next clash.
For markets and companies, that distinction matters as much as any summit optics. If Paris produces only a narrow holding pattern, businesses may get temporary reassurance but little clarity. If it produces a workable draft agenda for Beijing, the two governments will at least have shown they can still negotiate seriously on the most dangerous parts of the economic relationship.
