Bessent to Meet China's He Lifeng This Weekend Ahead of Trump-Xi Summit, With Iran Sanctions and $30 Billion in Tariffs on the Table

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday, September 15, that he'll sit down with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng this weekend, according to Bloomberg. The two men have met repeatedly over the past two years in Davos, Paris, London, Seoul, and Geneva, according to Crypto Briefing.

This is the last working-level session before President Trump hosts Xi Jinping at the White House. Chinese officials are planning the visit to run September 23 to 25, according to The Star (Malaysia), while the Business Times reported the Trump-Xi meeting itself is expected around September 24.

Iran, Soybeans, and a $30 Billion Tariff Deal

Bessent told the committee he wants to press He Lifeng on tightening sanctions related to Iran, according to Bloomberg. He's previously said any entity that helps Iran launder money will get cut off from the U.S. dollar system, and warned countries that "tether themselves to the Iranian regime" will face isolation, according to the Epoch Times.

On trade, the two sides have been circling a proposed "Board of Trade" mechanism that would cut tariffs on roughly $30 billion of goods each side considers non-strategic, according to the Epoch Times and Crypto Briefing. The U.S. is also pushing for China to buy around 25 million tons of American soybeans in 2026, a number with obvious political weight given farm-state voters, according to Crypto Briefing.

A source familiar with the talks told The Star the Chinese business delegation joining Xi is "more about optics than concrete deliverables," pointing to ongoing friction over Chinese investment in the U.S. Beijing is weighing sending its own tech, EV, and aerospace executives to mirror the American CEO delegation, which included the heads of Tesla, Apple, Nvidia, and Boeing, that traveled with Trump to Beijing in May. Several of the Chinese executives under consideration still don't have U.S. visas, and Beijing is pushing Washington to speed that up, per The Star.

Bessent's Pressure Campaign on China's Trade Surplus

Bessent attended a G20 finance ministers meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, on August 31 and September 1. He told reporters China's trade surplus, a record $1.2 trillion in 2025, is unsustainable and urged other G20 members to consider their own tariff walls, according to CTV News and Channel NewsAsia.

"The world cannot have a China with a $1.2 trillion trade surplus," Bessent said, according to the Epoch Times. He argued China is trying to export its way out of a weak domestic economy.

Not everyone at the table agreed on the fix. Polish Finance Minister Andrzej Domanski backed Bessent's read on an undervalued Chinese currency, while German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil pointed instead to the U.S.- and Israeli-led war with Iran and ongoing American tariff disputes as bigger sources of global uncertainty, according to Channel NewsAsia.

The tariff push has real costs at home, too. The Tax Foundation found Trump's 2025 tariffs raised retail prices on imported consumer goods by roughly 7% relative to pre-tariff trends, according to CTV News. The Supreme Court ruled in February that the administration's sweeping global tariffs under emergency powers law were unconstitutional, forcing a policy overhaul that now includes a proposed additional 7.5% tariff on Chinese imports tied to forced-labor and overcapacity findings.

The AI Fight Running Underneath It All

A separate U.S.-China dialogue on AI security is expected in mid-September, with Bessent leading the American side and either He Lifeng or Ding Xuexiang across the table, according to FPIF and the Business Times. U.S. agencies including the FBI, NSA, and CISA said Chinese firms Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Moonshot AI extracted "billions of tokens" from American models including Claude, Gemini, and Grok since late 2024, potentially with Chinese government awareness.

Bessent framed the stakes bluntly at a Breitbart News event on September 8: "There is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this," he said, adding that even a large U.S. defense budget wouldn't matter if China pulls ahead on AI, according to the Business Times.

Critics note the U.S. isn't exactly staying out of the offensive-AI business itself. FPIF pointed out that the NSA has been preparing Anthropic's Mythos model for offensive cyber operations with company engineers embedded, and that the Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk, a label a federal judge blocked in late August. If Washington is operationalizing its own frontier models for offensive use while accusing Beijing of model theft, skeptics argue that undercuts the moral high ground in the AI talks, even as the espionage allegations against Chinese actors, including a documented case involving Anthropic's Claude used against roughly 30 organizations last November, remain real and unresolved.

Sources told The Star that Beijing is treating the entire visit, delegation lists included, as a matter of reciprocity and optics as much as substance.