Donald Trump and Xi Jinping eye $US30b tariff cuts as US China trade talks build ahead of Washington summit

China and the United States hope to reach an agreement on lowering import taxes soon, a Chinese government spokesperson says, fuelling expectations that an announcement could come when the leaders of the two countries meet in two weeks.

Negotiators are striving to implement reciprocal tariff reductions on $US30 billion ($A42 billion) worth of goods “at an early date,” Commerce Ministry spokeswoman Huang Ling said at a weekly briefing.

The $US30 billion will be from each side, China’s official Xinhua News Agency said.

US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to meet in Washington DC on September 24 for what will be their third face-to-face talks in the past year.

Both governments characterise the meetings as a way to stabilise relations in an era of competing interests between the world’s two largest economies.

“Leaders’ diplomacy plays an irreplaceable strategic guiding role in China-US relations,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said on Thursday.

Mr Trump and Xi agreed at their previous meeting in May in Beijing to launch a US-China Board of Trade that would manage trade between the two countries, along with a parallel Board of Investment.

The agreements came after a truce was reached following an escalation in tensions in which Mr Trump hiked tariffs on Chinese imports to extremely high levels and China responded in kind.

The talks on reciprocal tariff reductions are a central part of the negotiations on creating the Board of Trade.

The goal is to identify and reduce tariffs on equivalent amounts of “non-sensitive” goods on each side, the US said.

“Trade will be front and centre at the summit,” Barclays Bank said in a research note this week on the upcoming Mr Trump-Xi meeting, noting that the truce the two countries reached on tariffs expires on November 10.

But it cautioned that the scope for a broad trade deal is limited, and that targeted tariff reductions are more likely.

But as the US and China have already reduced mutual trade reliance, the “overall trade significance will be more limited than before, given the smaller bilateral volume,” said Gary Ng, a senior economist at French bank Natixis.

Chinese exports to the US, for example, fell sharply last year, after the US rolled out elevated tariffs.

An agreement on reciprocal tariff reductions could likely benefit the US more, as $US30 billion is roughly 28 per cent of its exports to China, while it is only about 10 per cent the other way around, Ng said.