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Trump-Xi Meeting: Why Experts Say China Came Out Ahead
By Sara Dorn,Forbes Staff.
Sara Dorn is a Forbes news reporter who covers politics.
Oct 30, 2025, 11:13am EDT
Key Facts
The U.S. agreed to reduce a tariff punishing China for the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. by 10%, drop its threat of a new 100% tariff beginning Nov. 1 and extend a pause on reciprocal tariffs for another year, according to China’s Ministry of Commerce—notable deescalations of Trump’s trade war with China.China, meanwhile, agreed to extend for one year a pause on export controls of rare earth minerals that were in response to Trump’s tariffs, though Trump acknowledged the deal would need to be renegotiated when the year is up.
By leveraging its monopoly on rare earths, China “successfully orchestrated a game of ‘whack-a-mole’ for the Trump administration,” Brookings Institution fellow Jonathan Czin told The New York Times.
The outcome of the meeting “on the surface . . . might look like a return to the status quo before the trade war,” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote, “but it’s more like our surrendering and ending up in a weaker position after a conflict we started,” noting Trump’s tariffs “led China to weaponize its control of rare earths.”
Joe Mazur, a geopolitics analyst at Trivium China consultancy firm, told Reuters the Trump administration’s negotiations with China are “more or less total vindication of China’s strategy of never striking first but always striking back,” calling China’s hold on rare earths “the ace in the hole that China” without “any comparable leverage” from the U.S.
Some other experts said the meeting prevents a new flare up, for now, but “was less breakthrough than breathing room,” Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Politico, while The Economist called the meeting “more grand bazaar than grand bargain.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarado...meeting-why-experts-say-china-came-out-ahead/
