The United States and China have extended their pause on port fees targeting each other’s ships by two more months, with Washington’s suspension taking effect on Nov. 9 and Beijing announcing its own the same day.
The fees grew out of a contest over China’s dominance of global shipbuilding. Under a schedule the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative set in April 2025, Chinese-owned or -operated ships would pay $50 per net ton on each U.S. voyage, and Chinese-built ships $18 per net ton or $120 per container, whichever is higher, with rates rising each year through 2028.
Beijing retaliated with fees of 400 yuan ($56) per net ton on U.S.-linked ships and sanctioned five U.S. subsidiaries of South Korean shipbuilder Hanwha Ocean, including Hanwha Philly Shipyard in Pennsylvania, accusing them of aiding the U.S. investigation behind the fees.
Washington’s pause now runs through 11:59 p.m. ET on Jan. 9, 2027, while Beijing kept its fees and the Hanwha sanctions on hold for two more months.
The port fees are one piece of a two-month extension of the trade truce that President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping struck in Busan, South Korea, in October 2025. The extension is far shorter than the original one-year pause, and U.S. officials are pressing communist China to deliver on the farm purchases and rare earth supplies it promised there. Unless the two sides act again, the measures return in January.
Trump and Xi are expected to meet at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China, on Nov. 18–19, in what would be their third meeting this year.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in September that a two-month extension would “give us more time to see what we can do on the economic front,” adding that “there are some deliverables that have not been perfect on the Chinese side.” He said Beijing had kept up its soybean purchases but was behind schedule on other U.S. farm goods.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer put it more bluntly.
“China has created this uncertainty. They’ve limited rare earth exports. They’ve controlled them. We monitor them,” he told Bloomberg TV in September, adding that claiming full trust and confidence in each other at this point would be “a little naive.”
Beijing announced its steps on Nov. 9, suspending its measures rather than scrapping them. Its State Council Tariff Commission said the additional 24 percent tariff on U.S. goods would stay suspended for two more months, while a 10 percent tariff remains in place.
The Commerce Ministry and the General Administration of Customs extended the pause on sweeping export controls on rare earths and other materials that Beijing unveiled in October 2025 through Jan. 10, 2027, three weeks before Busan. Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), who chairs the House Select Committee on China, called China’s rare earth controls “a loaded gun pointed at our economy.”
The pause leaves in place a licensing requirement Beijing imposed in April 2025 on exports of seven medium and heavy rare earths, including dysprosium and terbium.
The Commerce Ministry also kept its measures against 16 U.S. entities on its export control list and 11 U.S. companies on its unreliable entity list on hold.
The U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security published a rule in the Federal Register on Nov. 9 that keeps its so-called Affiliates Rule on hold until Jan. 10, 2027. The Affiliates Rule, issued in September 2025, would extend export restrictions to companies at least 50 percent owned by blacklisted firms.
The trade representative’s office also renewed 178 exclusions from its Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods for two months.
Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 lets the office act against foreign trade practices it finds unfair. The office used the law in July to impose a 12.5 percent tariff on most Chinese goods as part of a forced-labor action covering 60 economies.
Bessent and Greer pressed Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng on farm purchases and rare earth supplies again in a Nov. 6 video call. Bessent urged China to honor its Busan commitments “fully and immediately,” according to a Treasury readout, and Greer’s office said the administration will keep “monitoring compliance of past commitments.”
A day before the call, China’s Commerce Ministry said buying more U.S. agricultural products depends on a reciprocal tariff-cut deal taking effect. The White House did not specify that condition when it announced in May that Beijing would buy at least $17 billion of U.S. farm goods a year.
Beijing pushed back during the call, expressing “serious concern” over recent U.S. economic and trade restrictions, state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.
It also left the door open to retaliation. The Chinese tariff commission’s office said China has noted repeated U.S. statements about using Section 301 tariffs to replace the emergency tariffs the Supreme Court struck down in February.
“China will continue to closely follow subsequent U.S. measures and adjust the relevant tariff countermeasures as the situation warrants,” the office said.
China has fallen short of trade pledges before. Under the Phase One deal Trump signed in January 2020, it bought none of the additional $200 billion in U.S. goods and services it had promised over two years, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Beijing also halted U.S. soybean purchases during trade disputes in 2018 and again in early 2025.
When the Busan truce was struck, Moolenaar said the deal’s success would ultimately be measured by “whether China upholds its promises or lies and cheats as it usually does.”
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