HONG KONG — China accused the United States on Monday of breaching the 90-day trade truce agreed to by the world’s two largest economies after President Donald Trump said it was Beijing that had “totally violated” the agreement.
The Commerce Ministry statement capped a contentious weekend in U.S.-China relations, which also included a speech in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said China “seeks to become a hegemonic power in Asia.”
Last month, the United States and China announced a 90-day pause on most of their tit-for-tat tariffs, which had reached higher than 100%. Trump initially hailed the truce as a “total reset” but said Friday on Truth Social that China had “TOTALLY VIOLATED” the deal.
The Commerce Ministry said Monday that while China had implemented and actively upheld the deal, the United States had introduced a series of “discriminatory and restrictive measures against China” that “severely undermine” the agreement.
The ministry said the measures included artificial intelligence chip export controls, a reported pause on the sale of chip design software to China, and the announcement of U.S. plans to revoke the visas of Chinese students.
“Instead of reflecting on its own actions, it has falsely accused China of violating the consensus, which is a serious distortion of the facts,” the ministry said in a statement. “China firmly rejects these groundless accusations.”
The ministry urged the United States to “immediately correct its erroneous practices” and vowed to take “strong and resolute” measures if Washington “insists on acting unilaterally and continues to harm China’s interests,” without providing details.
It was the second day in a row that China had rebuked the United States over its accusations toward Beijing. The Chinese government also objected to the speech Saturday by Hegseth, who urged allies in the Indo-Pacific region to increase their defense spending in the face of what could be an “imminent” threat from China to the self-governing island democracy of Taiwan.
“It has to be clear to all that Beijing is credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific,” he said at the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual security forum in Singapore.
China said Sunday that it had “strongly” protested to the United States over Hegseth’s remarks, which it said were “filled with provocations and intended to sow discord.”
“Hegseth deliberately ignored the call for peace and development by countries in the region, and instead touted the Cold War mentality for bloc confrontation, vilified China with defamatory allegations, and falsely called China a ‘threat,’” the Foreign Affairs Ministry said in a statement.
“The U.S. has deployed offensive weaponry in the South China Sea and kept stoking flames and creating tensions in the Asia-Pacific, which are turning the region into a powder keg,” it added.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that China was “holding back” exports of rare earth minerals that it had agreed to release as part of the trade truce.
“That is not what a reliable partner does,” he said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”
Rare earth minerals are a crucial component of products that cut across the U.S. economy, including the tech sector, the energy industry and automobile manufacturing.
China supplies 60% of the world’s rare earth elements and is responsible for refining 90% of them, according to the International Energy Agency.
Bessent, who said last week that U.S.-China trade talks were “a bit stalled,” said he was “confident” that rare earths exports and other details could be “ironed out” in a call between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“Maybe it’s a glitch in the Chinese system; maybe it’s intentional. We’ll see after the president speaks with the party chairman,” Bessent said, referring to Xi.
Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, also suggested Sunday that the two leaders could speak as early as this week.
“President Trump, we expect, is going to have a wonderful conversation about the trade negotiations this week with President Xi,” he said on the ABC News program “This Week.”
Hassett said he was unsure whether a specific date for the conversation had been set.
The last publicly known conversation between the U.S. and Chinese presidents was on Jan. 17, days before Trump’s inauguration.
While a Trump-Xi phone call could ease trade tensions in the short term, economic frictions between the United States and China are “very likely to continue for the foreseeable future,” said James F. Downes, assistant professor of international relations at Hong Kong Metropolitan University.
“For the sake of the global economy and for citizens of both countries, it is incredibly important for both sides to come to the table and find optimal policy solutions to resolve this current impasse,” he said in an email.
