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US President Donald Trump said he would cut tariffs imposed on China over the flow of chemical ingredients for fentanyl, as he arrived in South Korea ahead of a high-stakes summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Speaking on Air Force One on Wednesday, Trump said he would lower the 20 per cent tariff he imposed early in his term. The levy was designed to put pressure on Beijing to curb the export of precursor chemicals used to make the synthetic opioid, which has triggered an epidemic in the US.
“I expect to be lowering that because I believe they can help us with the fentanyl situation,” Trump said. “We have to get rid of it.”
The US president’s comment came days after US and Chinese officials wrapped up trade talks that produced a tentative deal for Trump and Xi to approve when they meet in the south-eastern city of Gyeongju on Thursday.
Following the trade talks, a US official had told the Financial Times that China was prepared to take concrete measures to stop the flow of fentanyl ingredients which, he said, would merit “a little bit of relief” from the US.
Trump is also set to meet South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung on Wednesday in Gyeongju, on the final leg of his Asian tour. Washington and Seoul are yet to finalise a deal that would give South Korea a lower tariff rate of 15 per cent in exchange for $350bn investment in the US.
Trump said last week that a deal was “pretty close to being finalised”, but Lee has insisted that several “sticking points” — including the amount, method and timeline of the Korean investment — remained unresolved.
“It is still a situation where one can neither be optimistic nor pessimistic,” Lee Kyu-youn, a senior aide to President Lee, told reporters on Wednesday, according to South Korea’s state-owned news agency Yonhap.
Korean officials told news agency Yonhap this week that Lee was planning to give Trump a replica of an ancient golden crown dating back to the Silla Kingdom, which ruled much of the Korean peninsula from Gyeongju during the first millennium. He is also expected to award Trump his country’s highest civilian order of merit, the Grand Order of Mugunghwa.
The blandishments come despite a rocky period in the allies’ relationship, which has been tested by Trump’s tariffs. In September, US immigration enforcement agents arrested and shackled hundreds of Korean workers at a battery plant in the US state of Georgia, further troubling ties between Washington and Seoul.
Without a deal on South Korea’s mooted $350bn investment, Asia’s fourth-largest economy continues to be subject to 25 per cent US tariffs, placing its auto exporters at a disadvantage relative to Japanese rivals, who are subject to a 15 per cent tariff under Tokyo’s agreement with Washington.
Korean officials are also nervous about the Trump administration’s determination to “modernise” the countries’ defence alliance, including by shifting its focus more squarely on China’s growing military capabilities.
Trump, who was greeted by a South Korean air force band playing “YMCA”, had previously said he would “love to meet” North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un and that he was prepared to discuss sanctions relief on the regime.
However, he told reporters on Air Force One that he was too busy. “I also want to focus on China,” Trump said.
The US president, who will attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum this week in South Korea, visited Japan on Tuesday, where he held his first meeting with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.
The leaders pledged to bring the US-Japan alliance into a new “golden age” and signed a deal on rare earths designed to reduce their countries’ dependence on China.
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