United States President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping have agreed to a trade truce under which the US will ease tariffs and Beijing will restart imports of US soya beans, delay the introduction of export restrictions on some of its rare earth metals and intensify efforts to curb illegal fentanyl trafficking.

Speaking after his meeting on Thursday with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea – their first face-to-face encounter since 2019 – Trump described the meeting as the capstone of his five-day Asia tour.

“I thought it was an amazing meeting,” Trump told reporters.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

Trump and Xi’s talks were shorter than expected

The short duration of Trump and Xi’s talks – about one hour and 40 minutes – took some observers by surprise.

Shan Guo, a partner at the Shanghai-based consultancy Hutong Research, said the “shorter-than-expected” meeting likely suggests both sides limited discussions to topics that had already been settled in advance.

Although no official timetable was released, Trump had earlier suggested the talks could last up to four hours.

But Trump said the result overall was “amazing”, adding that the meeting “was a 12 with 10 being best”.

This is not a trade deal

Instead, the two countries have agreed to a “truce” in their trade war, which has been raging on and off for the past year.

Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation in Singapore, told Al Jazeera the agreement could be seen as a “partial freeze” or “minor rollback” in the US-China trade war.

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The two countries agreed to the following for a period of one year – to be renegotiated and renewed after that time:

• China agreed to delay export restrictions on five rare earth metals it announced this month. But restrictions on a further seven, announced in April, will remain. Rare earth metals are used to manufacture many critical products, from smartphones to jet planes.
• Xi will work “very hard to stop the flow” of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opiate, Trump said. “I believe they are really taking strong action,” he added.
• As a result of Beijing’s commitment on fentanyl, Washington said it would halve its 20 percent fentanyl-related tariff. Overall, this will bring the tariff rate on Chinese goods from 57 percent to 47 precent – although analysts said this was not a particularly significant reduction. China’s average tariffs on US goods are 32 percent.
• The US president also said Chinese purchases of US soya beans will resume immediately.
• China will pause countermeasures related to Washington’s 301 investigation for a year. The 301 investigation refers to a US probe under Section 301 of the Trade Act, which allows Washington to impose tariffs or other measures in response to what it considers unfair trade practices by China, such as state subsidies, forced technology transfers and intellectual property violations.
• The Chinese Ministry of Commerce also said the US had agreed to suspend plans to extend technology-related export controls to Chinese subsidiaries and both sides would suspend tit-for-tat port fees.
• Trump will visit China in April, and Xi is expected to visit the US “sometime after that”.
• Trump said the US and China agreed to “work together” on the war in Ukraine while the issue of Taiwan, which China claims sovereignty over, did not come up, he said.

Trump signals willingness to discuss Chinese access to US technology

Semiconductors, which are crucial for the development of artificial intelligence (AI), have been a key source of tension between Washington and Beijing since former US President Joe Biden’s administration imposed export controls on US-made semiconductors to limit China’s access to advanced chips used in AI development.

One of the most closely watched companies in this dispute is Nvidia, a leading US chipmaker whose processors power most of the world’s AI systems.

Nvidia’s new Blackwell AI processors, unveiled this year, are considered central to its dominance in the global AI race and are among the technologies restricted under US export rules.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has tried to persuade the Trump administration to loosen the controls, saying Chinese AI’s dependence on US hardware was good for the US.

During his meeting with Xi, Trump said he had discussed semiconductor trade with China but the talks did not involve the Blackwell processors. “China is going to be talking to Nvidia and others about taking chips,” he said, adding, “We’re not talking about the Blackwell.”

Rare earths reprieve is a win for Trump

The agreement by China to delay export restrictions on rare earth metals represents another key area of strategic importance in the US-China relationship – one that, like semiconductors, sits at the intersection of trade and technology, and national security.

No details of the deal have been made public yet, but analysts believe it could be a major “win” for Trump.

“Rare earths are critical for the production of everything from smartphones to headphones to, of course, military defence weaponry, fighter jets and tanks,” Al Jazeera’s Katrina Yu said, reporting from Beijing. “This is a national security issue for Trump, and the problem for him is that China dominates this industry.”

China produces more than 70 percent of the world’s processed rare earth metals and rare earth magnets, according to the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Yu added that even if a deal has been struck, China is still likely to “use rare earths as leverage in any negotiations it has with the United States going forward”.

Why soya beans and fentanyl matter

Soya beans and fentanyl have long been flashpoints in US-China relations, symbolising the economic and political stakes on both sides.

Soya beans are the top farm product the US exports abroad, and China is one of the top buyers. During the trade war this year when China and the US slapped each other with tariffs exceeding 100 percent before agreeing a pause in May, China stopped buying US soya beans, causing exports to plunge and hurting farmers across the US Midwest, a key Trump political base.

A resumption of Chinese purchases would provide both an economic boost and a symbolic political win for the Trump administration. However, soya bean futures in Chicago slipped after the summit as traders were disappointed with the lack of concrete details about agricultural commitments.

Fentanyl, a highly addictive drug which is 50 times stronger than heroin, remains at the centre of the US opioid crisis, contributing to tens of thousands of overdose deaths each year. Washington has repeatedly accused Chinese suppliers of exporting the precursor chemicals used to manufacture it.

China previously pushed back on Trump’s accusations, saying it has done more than required to meet its obligations on narcotics control.

China ‘does not seek to replace any country’

According to Chinese state media reports on Thursday, Xi told Trump that China does not seek to challenge or replace any other country and instead focuses on “doing its own business well”.

He described China’s economy as “an ocean”, adding that the country is confident and capable of handling all kinds of risks and challenges.

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Xi said China-US relations remain generally stable and both sides’ teams should refine and follow up on the consensus reached.

The reports said Xi also “called on both sides to focus on long-term benefits brought by cooperation rather than falling into a vicious cycle of retaliation”.

Beijing also confirmed Trump’s visit to China next year.

In response to a reporter’s question, Trump declined to provide more details about this part of the talks but emphasised the scale of potential trade.

The question of China’s access to Nvidia’s chips remains a major point of US-China tech tension.

How successful was the Trump-Xi summit?

Einar Tangen, a senior fellow at the Taihe Institute in Beijing, said Trump’s decision to ease tariffs on Chinese goods from 57 percent to 47 percent “means nothing”.

“Any economist will tell you, tariffs 30 percent or above mean that you effectively end trade,” Tangen told Al Jazeera.

“It’s kind of an indication to me that there wasn’t as much progress [in these talks] as Donald Trump is trying to hint at,” he added.

Tangen said Beijing would have hoped the Trump administration would have lowered its tariffs to 20 or 25 percent, or 30 percent “at most”, putting them “on parity with the rest of the world”.

He added that until a joint communique is released, it would be hard to gauge just how successful this meeting really was.