China to suspend some rare earth curbs, US chip firm probes

The White House issued a fact sheet on Saturday outlining some details of the trade pact agreed to earlier this week by President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping that aimed to ease tensions between the world’s largest economies.

Under the deal, China will issue general licenses valid for exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite “for the benefit of U.S. end users and their suppliers around the world,” the White House said, meaning the effective removal of controls China imposed in April 2025 and October 2022. The US and China previously said Beijing would suspend more restrictive controls announced in October 2025 for one year.

The framework also states that China will terminate its antitrust, anti-monopoly and anti-dumping investigations into US chip companies, including those into Nvidia and Qualcomm, according to a US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Washington will also pause some of Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs on China for an additional year and is halting plans to implement a 100% tariff on Chinese exports to the US that was threatened for November. The White House also said that the US will further extend the expiration of certain Section 301 tariff exclusions, currently due to expire on Nov. 29, 2025, until Nov. 10, 2026.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that despite deals, the US and its allies need to be wary of China.

“This is a problem that has been with us for several decades, it’s never been addressed with these rare earths, the rare earth magnets,” Bessent said on Fox News Sunday. “The Chinese have cornered the market, and unfortunately, at times, they proved to be unreliable partners.”

Bessent added that he hoped “we can depend on them to be more reliable partners” after the implementation of the deal.

“China stands ready to work with the US to act on the important common understandings between the two presidents, and continuously shorten the list of problems and lengthen the list of cooperation through dialogue and consultation,” the Chinese Embassy in Washington said in a statement Sunday.

The landmark summit between Trump and Xi, their first face-to-face meeting of the US president’s second term, saw the leaders stabilize relations in the short term after an escalating trade fight that had roiled markets and sparked fears of a global downturn.

Under their agreement, according to the White House, China agreed to pause sweeping controls on rare-earth magnets in exchange for a US agreement to roll back an expansion of curbs on Chinese companies. China had used its dominance in the processing of rare-earth minerals as leverage, threatening to restrict their flow to the US and allies countries.

The US also agreed to halve a fentanyl-related tariff to 10% from 20%, while Beijing will resume purchases of American soybeans and other agricultural products. The US has said China will buy 12 million metric tons of soybeans during the current season, and a minimum of 25 million metric tons a year for the next three years. Trump on Friday indicated he would like to remove all of the fentanyl-related tariffs if China continued to crack down on exports of the drug and precursor chemicals used to make it.

“As soon as we see that, we’ll get rid of the other 10%,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday.

The US also said on Saturday that Beijing will take steps to allow the Chinese facilities of Dutch chipmaker Nexperia BV to resume shipments, confirming a Bloomberg report from a day earlier. This move will likely ease worries about chip shipments that had threatened auto production as a trade fight between China and the US escalated.

But while the agreement has calmed tensions, the pact may be a short-term truce in an extended trade fight with the measures just meant to last one year. And despite addressing some key issues — and with both sides winning key concessions — the agreement fails to comprehensively address all of the issues at the heart of the US-China trade fight and other geopolitical flashpoints such as Taiwan and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Trump has signed off on a plan that would see an American consortium buy the US operations of ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok app, but Beijing has yet to formally approve that sale. The US president has also said there would be cooperation on energy, saying that China had agreed to purchases oil and gas from Alaska.