China said on Tuesday that the United States needs to “stop spreading disinformation” and correct “wrongful actions” as the trade tensions between the two countries continue.
China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian claimed the U.S. “falsely accuses and smears” China and that Washington has taken “extreme suppression” measures. He listed “chip export controls, blocking EDA sales and announcing plans to revoke Chinese students’ visas” as actions that have “seriously disrupted the consensus and hurt China’s legitimate rights and interests.”
“China firmly opposes them and has lodged strong protests with the US,” Lin wrote in a Tuesday post on the social media platform X.
Treasury Department Secretary Scott Bessent said on Sunday that President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will likely talk “soon” — a conversation that will include discussing critical minerals.
“I am confident that when President Trump and party Chairman Xi have a call, that this will be ironed out,” Bessent said during his Sunday appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “But the fact that they are withholding some of the products that they agreed to release during our agreement — maybe it’s a glitch in the Chinese system, maybe it’s intentional.”
The world’s two biggest economies have accused each other in recent days of violating the terms of the trade agreement struck during the meetings in Geneva last month.
Trump hammered China on Friday, arguing that Beijing violated the terms of the agreement.
“Two weeks ago China was in grave economic danger! The very high Tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to TRADE into the United States marketplace which is, by far, number one in the World. We went, in effect, COLD TURKEY with China, and it was devastating for them. Many factories closed and there was, to put it mildly, ‘civil unrest.’ I saw what was happening and didn’t like it, for them, not for us,” the president wrote on Truth Social.
“I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen,” the commander-in-chief added.
China fired back on Monday, saying that Washington was in breach of the trade agreement, citing the guidance on chip export controls, the pause of sales of chip design software to China and the revocation of F-1 student visas of Chinese students in the U.S.
After the May talks in Switzerland, the Trump administration brought down the tariffs on Chinese imports from 145 percent to 30 percent. China lowered its duties on U.S. goods from 125 percent to 10 percent.
Lin, the foreign ministry spokesperson, added on Tuesday that pressure and “coercion are not the right way to engage China.”
“We urge the US to respect the facts, stop spreading disinformation, correct its wrongful actions, and act to uphold the consensus reached between the two sides,” the spokesperson added.
