No Trump-Xi tariff talks underway, China says

U.S. President Donald Trump answers reporters’ questions after exiting Marine One at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 27, 2025.

Ken Cedeno | Reuters

China on Monday once again denied that it is in talks to resolve its tariff war with the United States, after a series of statements by President Donald Trump and his aides suggesting trade negotiations were underway.

“Let me make it clear one more time that China and the U.S. are not engaged in any consultation or negotiation on tariffs,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said at a press conference.

Guo also appeared to reject Trump’s claim, in an interview with TIME last week, that Chinese President Xi Jinping had called him.

“As far as I know, there have not been any calls between the two presidents recently,” the spokesman said.

The latest blanket denial was in line with Beijing’s hardline stance against Trump’s massive 145% tariffs on imports from China, a top supplier of U.S. goods.

Trump administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, insist that the U.S. is better positioned to win a trade war than China is.

But American business owners and analysts are raising alarms that the effective trade embargo with China could soon result in major economic consequences, including higher prices, product shortages and store closures.

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Against that backdrop — and Trump’s recent claim that his administration will be finished crafting new trade deals with numerous countries in as little as three or four weeks — some U.S. officials have expressed more openness toward a dialogue with Beijing.

“Every day we are in conversation with China,” Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, said Sunday on CNN.

When told that the Chinese deny this, Rollins said, “Well, according to our team in Washington, the conversations are ongoing regarding multiples of trade, multiples of the trade goods that are coming out and going in.”

“The bottom line with China is this, they need us more than we need them,” she said.

Asked on Sunday why China would deny that negotiations are underway, Bessent said, “Well, I think they’re playing to a different audience.”

Pressed to explain whether the talks are actually happening, he said, “We have a process in place. And again, I just believe these Chinese tariffs are unsustainable.”

Bessent predicted last week that a “de-escalation” with China was coming in the “very near future.”

On Monday morning, he pointed to that prospective de-escalation to help explain why he was not yet concerned that U.S. consumers could soon face empty store shelves.

“Not at present,” Bessent said on Fox News, when asked if he was concerned about “empty shelves.”

“We have some great retailers. I assume they pre-ordered. I think we’ll see some elasticities and I think we’ll see replacements, and then we will see how quickly the Chinese want to de-escalate,” said Bessent.

In a separate interview Monday morning on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Bessent put the onus for that de-escalation on China, before saying he would not negotiate through the press.

China has consistently demanded that Trump, who has held up tariffs as both a powerful negotiating tool and way to rake in government revenue, scrap his sweeping import taxes.

“If the U.S. really wants to resolve the problem … it should cancel all the unilateral measures on China,” a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said last week.

That statement, translated from Mandarin by CNBC, was itself a response to Trump’s claim on Thursday that U.S. and Chinese officials “had a meeting this morning.”

“We’ve been meeting with China,” Trump told reporters, while declining to specify who was meeting whom.

A day earlier, Trump said that U.S. officials were “actively” talking with China.