US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a post on X that he spoke with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng to discuss Trump's travel to Beijing, planned for May 14 to May 15.
"Our meeting was both candid and comprehensive, and I stressed that China's recent provocative extraterritorial regulations have a chilling effect on global supply chains," Bessent said.
His comment breaks the Trump administration's near silence on new supply chain rules from Beijing that have alarmed US businesses. Analysts have called these a major escalation that could seriously undercut American efforts to reduce supply chain dependence on China.
China's rules, rolled out in recent weeks, lay the legal groundwork for punishing foreign companies that seek to shift their sourcing for critical minerals and other goods away from China, as Bessent, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and the Trump administration seek to do.
Bessent offered no US response to the new regulation and said he looks forward to "a productive summit between President Trump and President Xi in Beijing."
Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said Vice Premier He Lifeng had "candid, in-depth and constructive exchanges" with Bessent and Greer over a video call.
The Chinese side "expressed serious concern over the recent US restrictive trade measures against China", but both sides agreed to further enhance consensus, manage differences and strengthen co-operation, according to CCTV.
The trio last met in March for in-person trade talks in Paris, to lay groundwork for the Trump-Xi summit, discussing potential Chinese purchases of US agriculture goods and potential new joint bodies to manage trade and investment issues between the world's two largest economies.
China said the video call was aimed at "properly resolving economic and trade issues of mutual concern and expanding pragmatic co-operation," a sign that the Beijing summit was on track.
In a separate call on Thursday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, was the "biggest point of risk" in US-China ties ahead of the Trump-Xi summit.
The two countries reached an uneasy trade truce last October when they met in Busan, South Korea, following a months-long tit-for-tat trade war sparked by Trump's so-called "Liberation Day" tariffs and China's restrictions on exports of rare-earths and other critical minerals that it dominates. The US Supreme Court struck down Trump's global duties in February, prompting the Trump administration to launch new tariff investigations to rebuild them.
As the Trump-Xi summit draws closer, US politicians and industry groups are warning the Trump administration against offering China investment access to the US automotive sector, arguing this would hollow out a core domestic industry and create national security risks through data collection.
