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US targets China’s global trade surplus at G20 meeting ahead of Xi-Trump summit
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Nayan Sethin WashingtonPublished: 3:10am, 1 Sep 2026US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday targeted China’s global trade surplus, raising concerns over “excessive imbalances,” weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to arrive in Washington for a bilateral summit with US President Donald Trump.“We are confronting persistent global imbalances that undermine prosperity,” Bessent said in his opening address at the G20 Finance Ministers’ meeting in Asheville, North Carolina. The United States holds the G20 presidency in 2026, leading a forum of the world’s major advanced and emerging economies.Without naming China, Bessent said that the grouping’s finance ministers and central bank governors “have broadly concurred that it is in the interests of both surplus and deficit countries to address excessive imbalances”.
“We have seen how distorted policies that privileged countries’ own exports have harmed many of the economies represented here today,” he said, adding that a “durable global economy cannot rest on beggar-thy-neighbour acts that stifle fair market-based competition.”
Preliminary framework agreed ahead of Trump-Xi meeting
Washington has made trade imbalances a key theme of the G20 ministerial – part of decades-long complaints about Beijing’s high trade surpluses – as a surge in Chinese exports of major products such as automobiles, solar panels and batteries has raised concerns in many countries over Beijing’s alleged “overcapacity”.
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