China Restores Beef Trade With U.S. as Goodwill Gesture for Trump Visit

Beijing granted permission on Thursday for hundreds of American slaughterhouses to resume beef shipments to China, 15 months after Chinese officials had signaled displeasure with President Trump’s initial tariffs by allowing the industrial facilities’ licenses to expire.

The approval came before the start of Mr. Trump’s talks with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. President Trump is expected to press Mr. Xi to buy more American goods and reduce a trade imbalance in which China has long sold the United States three to five times more goods than it buys from America.

In early 2020, Beijing approved five-year export licenses allowing more than 300 American slaughterhouses to ship beef to the Chinese market. Beijing allowed these licenses to expire on March 16, 2025.

The timing was a snub. President Trump was scheduled to send an unofficial emissary to Beijing just days later — Senator Steve Daines, a Republican from Montana, the leading beef-exporting state.

Senator Daines, a longtime industry advocate, led a bipartisan delegation of five senators to China earlier this month. Their discussions covered potential Chinese purchases of American beef, other agricultural commodities and Boeing aircraft.

The newly issued licenses have various expiration dates through late 2029, a shorter duration than those issued in 2020.

However, these approvals do not guarantee that China will resume buying large quantities of American beef. Beijing manages imports through state-controlled purchasing associations that favor geopolitical and trade allies.

Beijing also maintains an elaborate system of annual quotas to protect its domestic cattle industry. For example, Brazil, which has increasingly aligned itself with Beijing, received a quota of 1.1 million metric tons. By contrast, China’s quota for the United States this year, set last December, was only 164,000 metric tons.

China has contended that its intermittent approvals of American beef shipments stem from concerns about mad cow disease, citing a single case in Washington state in 2003 involving a cow imported from Canada.