China and US held ‘working-level talks’ on Monday despite trade spat

Beijing and Washington conducted working-level talks on Monday despite a renewed escalation in trade tensions, China’s Ministry of Commerce has said, urging the US to “show sincerity for dialogue”.

“The US cannot engage in dialogue while intimidating and threatening to impose new restrictions. This is not the right way to deal with China,” the ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.

“China urges the US to immediately correct its wrong practices and show sincerity for dialogue.”

Tensions between the world’s two largest economies ratcheted up last week amid a barrage of economic sanctions, export controls and threats of triple-digit tariffs, casting a shadow over a planned meeting between Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum in South Korea later this month.

But the two sides have maintained communication under the framework of a bilateral economic and trade consultation mechanism, which was established during trade negotiations earlier this year, the statement said.

The remarks came after US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on Sunday that Beijing’s expansion of rare earth export controls had caught the US off guard and that Beijing had refused to discuss the issue.

“I can tell you that we were not notified, and quickly, as soon as we found out from public sources, we reached out to the Chinese to have a phone call, and they deferred,” Greer said in a TV interview.