Trump Hints at Pressing China on Soybean Purchases

Oct 03, 2025 - 09:55

Updated: 10 months ago

Trump Hints at Pressing China on Soybean Purchases

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Oct. 1 that China’s soybean purchases would be front and center in his upcoming meeting with Xi Jinping, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party.

“The Soybean Farmers of our Country are being hurt because China is, for ‘negotiating’ reasons only, not buying,” the president said in a post on Truth Social.

Trump reiterated the plans to use the money the U.S. government brought in from tariffs to cushion the loss of American farmers, while accusing the Biden administration of failing to enforce the trade deal struck with Beijing during his first term.

“I’ll be meeting with President Xi, of China, in four weeks, and Soybeans will be a major topic of discussion,” he said.

“It’s all going to work out very well,“ he wrote, adding in all caps, ”I love our patriots, and every farmer is exactly that!”

Soybeans are traditionally the primary U.S. agricultural export to China; however, data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) indicate that China has not made any soybean purchases from the United States since May.

In August, Trump urged Beijing to quadruple its purchases of soybeans, suggesting it could help close the massive trade deficit with the United States—an issue the president has linked to the recent tariff hike on China.

As of Sept. 11, China had not purchased any “new crop soybeans,” according to the USDA.

China, the world’s largest buyer of soybeans, has a record of pulling back on U.S. purchases amid rising bilateral tensions. Much of the trade was frozen in 2018 when Trump first raised the tariffs on nearly $370 billion worth of Chinese goods, citing the communist regime’s intellectual property theft, forced technology transfers, and other unfair trade policies and practices. USDA data showed that China bought $3.1 billion worth of soybeans from the United States that year, about a quarter of the $12.2 billion it had purchased in 2017.

The Chinese regime had pledged to purchase an additional $200 billion in U.S. farm, energy, and other manufactured goods for 2020 and 2021, as part of the “phase one” trade agreement signed in January 2020 to settle the trade conflicts.

U.S. officials have stated that the Chinese regime has failed to meet these promises. A 2022 analysis of trade data by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), a think tank, found that China achieved approximately 58 percent of its purchase target for U.S. goods covered under the phase one agreement. For farm goods, China met only 77 percent of its purchase commitment, according to the report.

A booth of the U.S. Soybean Export Council during the China International Supply Chain Expo (CISCE) in Beijing on July 16, 2025. Jade Gao/AFP via Getty Images

In recent years, China has increasingly turned to South American countries, such as Brazil and Argentina, for soybean imports.

In 2024, China purchased a record 116 million tons of soybeans, according to the regime’s customs data. Of that, 82.3 million tons came from Brazil—a 6.7 percent increase from the prior year—while arrivals from the United States fell by 5.7 percent to 24.4 million tons.

The United States and China are in a temporary trade truce that is set to expire on Nov. 10. Trump said after a phone call with Xi last month that they agreed to meet face to face at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, which is set to take place in South Korea in late October.