What Trump and Xi did and didn't agree upon in their meeting

From fentanyl to rare earth minerals, President Donald Trump’s highly anticipated meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the last leg of his three-country Asia tour helped the world’s two biggest economies ease their trade tensions, or at least some of them.

“A lot of finalization,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One after he departed Busan, South Korea, where he met Thursday with Xi for about an hour and 40 minutes, saying he would rate the “amazing” meeting a “12” on a scale from zero to 10.

While they did not ink a finalized agreement, Trump said that a deal could be signed “pretty soon” and that there were “not too many major stumbling blocks.”

Trump said that he would visit China in April and that Xi would visit either Florida or Washington “some time after that.”

Here are the main takeaways from the summit:

Trump said he was lowering fentanyl tariffs on China to 10% from 20%, effective immediately. He said that would bring the total effective tariff rate on Chinese imports to 47% from 57%.

Trump said he trusts Xi will “work very hard” to stop the illicit flow of fentanyl precursors, the chemicals used to make the deadly opioid, from China to other countries. “I think you’re going to see a big difference,” he said.

U.S. officials say China has not done enough to stop the illegal export of the precursor ingredients, which are processed into fentanyl in Mexican labs and then smuggled into the United States.

China has rejected the accusations, calling its anti-fentanyl efforts the “most relentless” in the world.

A key issue in U.S.-China trade negotiations has been rare earth materials, which are crucial for making magnets that go in everything from turbines to electric vehicles.

China, which has a near-monopoly on the global supply, rattled automakers around the world when it imposed strict export controls on the materials, saying it was trying to snuff out their military use, and it has since used them as a powerful bargaining chip in trade talks.

Trump said Xi had agreed to a one-year reprieve on the curbs that is likely to be “routinely extended.”

“All of the rare earth has been settled, and that’s for the world,” he said. A White House official standing alongside him said Trump and Xi had come to “an understanding” and that China is “not going to impose the rare earth controls that they proposed.”

Analysts say even though the United States is pushing to reduce its reliance on China for the materials — with Trump signing critical minerals agreements with Thailand, Malaysia and Japan on this trip — it will be a while before that happens.

“Building new mines and, especially, expanding processing capacity — which is the real bottleneck — requires years of sustained effort and substantial investment,” Patrik Andersson, an analyst at the Swedish National China Centre at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, told NBC News.

Trump said China, which resumed purchases of U.S. soybeans ahead of the meeting after having boycotted them for months, would purchase “large, tremendous amounts of soybeans and other farm products.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said China would buy 12 million metric tons of soybeans from the United States between now and January as part of an agreement to purchase 25 million metric tons annually for three years.

The halt in purchases from China, the biggest market for U.S. soybeans, has been a major pain point for American farmers, who have been pressing the Trump administration to resolve the issue.

China had not purchased any U.S. soybeans since May, sourcing instead from South American countries such as Argentina and Brazil.

"Our great soybean farmers, who the Chinese used as political pawns, that’s off the table, and they should prosper in the years to come,” Bessent said in an interview on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria.”

Trump has long vowed to broker an end to the war in Ukraine, but after having faced resistance from Russia, he has turned to the Kremlin’s close partners for help: India and China.

The United States and China will “work together” on ending the war between Russia and Ukraine, Trump said, adding, “Ukraine came up very strongly; we talked about it for a long time.”

“We’re both going to work together to see if we can get something done,” he said.

Asked about Taiwan, Trump told reporters that he and Xi didn’t talk about the Beijing-claimed island democracy during their meeting. “Taiwan never came up,” he said. “It was not discussed, actually.”

When it came to the American artificial intelligence giant Nvidia, which on Wednesday became the first company to be worth $5 trillion, Trump said there was no discussion as to whether the United States would further relax its export curbs to allow the export of Nvidia’s latest chips, called Blackwell.

“We’re not talking about Blackwell chips,” Trump said.

The United States allows limited exports of the older H20 GPU chips, which are a modified version specially designed for the Chinese market.

Trump did not address the proposed TikTok deal between the United States and China after the meeting, but it appears China approved it during Trump’s Asia trip.

Under a U.S. law that was passed last year based on national security concerns, the popular Chinese-owned app must sell its U.S. operations to a U.S. owner.

Earlier in the week, Bessent said a TikTok deal might be finalized during the meeting between Trump and Xi. After the meeting, Bessent told Fox Business Network that China had approved a deal during talks in Kuala Lumpur and that other finalizations for the deal would occur over the next weeks and months.

After the meeting, the spokesperson for China’s Commerce Ministry said in a statement that the country agreed “to work with the U.S. to properly resolve issues related to TikTok,” according to a translation.