There is no US-China truce to undermine

It was a partial US retreat. Tech and general conflict never cooled.

There have been a number of reports in the last 48 hours arguing that a “trade truce” struck in Geneva earlier this month is in danger, even as it is cited in connection with a spike in US consumer confidence.

“China thought it had a truce with the US. Then Trump dropped two bombshells,” says a CNN headline writer. “Export controls are endangering the fragile US-China truce,” says NYT.

Bill Bishop

says “US-China Geneva ‘détente’ may be breaking” and then rightly comments that “the ‘détente’ is not really a détente and, whatever it is, it is very fragile.”

The Geneva deal, at the basic level, was not a “truce” but a unilateral US retreat met with a removal of Chinese retaliatory measures. Trump backed down on the tariff front in specific, and the Chinese government pledged to remove its tit-for-tat measures responding to unilateral US moves. That’s it. Neither side got anything else except an agreement to talk more.

Other policies dating to the first Trump administration and the Biden administration that put US-China economic ties, especially in tech, on a perilous footing remain untouched. Among them:

—Chip controls. The United States maintains and continues to tighten export controls that seek to hold back Chinese development in AI among other endeavors. Sources that suggested the Trump administration might not continue tightening chip controls for AI turned out to be wrong. That was before Geneva. The joint statement following Geneva said nothing about rolling back or pausing this kind of thing, and it should be no surprise that the US government reportedly took another step on semiconductor design software this week. Bottom line: The ratchet forward of US efforts to stymie China’s advanced computing sector, a major irritant to China that even US observers have called a “declaration of economic war,” continues apace.

—Critical minerals. It was never clear what if any restrictions on the export of critical minerals or rare earths to the United States China would reverse or pause as part of the Geneva deal. The joint statement said China would “suspend or remove the non-tariff countermeasures taken against the United States since April 2, 2025.” This might include the April 4 export restrictions on rare earths, but those measures could just as well be understood to be responses not to US tariffs but to the older, ongoing, and not-suspended chip controls. They don’t seem to have been removed, and it was never clear this was part of the deal. Meanwhile, China’s 2024 ban on gallium, germanium, and antimony exports to the United States is obviously out of scope and still intact. Bottom line: China isn’t giving up on weaponizing a bit of interdependence back at the United States as the Trump administration continues down Biden’s road on tech controls. US strategists won’t and shouldn’t stop worrying about mineral supplies.

Then you have the general, continuing US-based shocks to bilateral ties. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the United States would start “aggressively” revoking visas for Chinese students, he escalated Chinese citizens’ personal safety and everyday life concerns. AP reports that in the ‘23–24 school year, 270,000 Chinese students were studying in the United States. That’s a lot of people back home one- or two-degrees separated from someone who at minimum fears their future plans could be upturned at any time.

They can take no comfort from zero-credibility modifiers in Rubio’s announcement, noting they’d target Communist Party links or “critical fields.” Capricious, sloppy, illegal operations against non-citizens are a hallmark of the Trump administration, and Rubio personally owns the abuse of power to target individuals based on false characterizations and protected speech. It is fully rational for every Chinese student in the United States now to fear being taken off the street by masked “homeland security” agents at random.

This is a new US escalation that builds momentum toward full decoupling and comprehensive rivalry, with no braking mechanism in sight. But it has nothing to do with the unilateral tariff retreat the US made in Geneva.

There was no US-China truce. If markets and pundits can’t see past panicked Trump administration efforts to obscure their direction of travel and keep it off balance sheets, that’s their problem.

About Here It Comes

Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.