US and Chinese negotiators have agreed in principle to push back the deadline for escalating tariffs, although America’s representatives said any extension would need Donald Trump’s approval.
Officials from both sides said after two days of talks in Stockholm that while had failed to find a resolution across the many areas of dispute they had agreed to extend a pause due to run out on 12 August.
Beijing’s top trade negotiator, Li Chenggang, said the extension of a truce struck in mid-May would allow for further talks, without specifying when and for how long the latest pause would run.
However, the US trade representative Jamieson Greer stressed that President Trump would have the “final call” on any extension.
The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, joined the talks in the Swedish capital to give weight to the US negotiating team, but appeared unable to break the deadlock.
Bessent said he had told Chinese officials that, given US secondary tariff legislation on sanctioned Russian oil, China could face high tariffs if Beijing continued with its Russian oil purchases.
China has taken an aggressive stance in response to Trump’s threatened border taxes, retaliating with tariffs of its own on US goods and blocking the sale of vital rare earth metals and components used by American defence and hi-tech manufacturers.
Trump is on course to impose extra tariffs on Mexico and Canada from Friday, barring last-minute deals. Vietnam, Cambodia and several other south-east Asian countries are also lobbying for extensions to talks to head off a rise in US tariffs.
Negotiations between White House representatives and trading partners threatened with high tariffs have often proved to be drawn out. The EU’s trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, spent more than 100 hours negotiating before the US agreed to reduce a planned 30% tariff to 15% on EU exports to the US in a deal announced on Sunday.
Pascal Lamy, a former director general of the World Trade Organization, said many of the trade agreements announced by the White House were light on detail and needed further negotiation, leading to further uncertainty.
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He said the deal struck between the US and EU was “not half-baked, but maybe just two-thirds baked, leaving much more to be discussed and agreed”.
Underlining the stakes, the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday upgraded its global growth forecast to 3% from an estimate in April of 2.8% after the scaling back of the worst Trump trade threats. However, it flagged a potential rebound in tariff rates as a big risk.
