United States President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping have agreed to a trade truce under which the US will ease tariffs and Beijing will restart imports of US soya beans, delay the introduction of export restrictions on some of its rare earth metals and intensify efforts to curb illegal fentanyl trafficking.Speaking after his meeting on Thursday with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea – their first face-to-face encounter since 2019 – Trump described the meeting as the capstone of his five-day Asia tour.“I thought it was an amazing meeting,” Trump told reporters.Here are some of the key takeaways:Trump and Xi’s talks were shorter than expectedThe short duration of Trump and Xi’s talks – about one hour and 40 minutes – took some observers by surprise.Shan Guo, a partner at the Shanghai-based consultancy Hutong Research, said the “shorter-than-expected” meeting likely suggests both sides limited discussions to topics that had already been settled in advance.Although no official timetable was released, Trump had earlier suggested the talks could last up to four hours.But Trump said the result overall was “amazing”, adding that the meeting “was a 12 with 10 being best”.This is not a trade dealInstead, the two countries have agreed to a “truce” in their trade war, which has been raging on and off for the past year.Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation in Singapore, told Al Jazeera the agreement could be seen as a “partial freeze” or “minor rollback” in the US-China trade war. Advertisement The two countries agreed to the following for a period of one y …
