Highs and lows mark China-US ties in 2025

China-US relations swung between highs and lows in 2025, but high-level trade talks and head-of-state diplomacy offered hope that the relationship will stabilize and become more predictable in the next 12 months, experts said.

Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, said that while 2024 saw a gradual decline in bilateral relations, 2025 witnessed more of a "rollercoaster" situation.

The year was marked by bouts of intense turbulence followed by periods of slow cooling down, as ties between the world's two largest economies deteriorated not by chance but due to the US' calculated political moves, he said.

As bilateral trade and economic relations remained on tenterhooks despite several rounds of talks, China's consistent stand of — "Talk, our door is open; fight, we'll respond till the end" — became a widely shared catchphrase online.

According to Hufbauer, the tensions primarily escalated because the administration of US President Donald Trump assumed that aligning with China hawks would pay political dividends. As a result, the US imposed staggering, triple-digit tariffs on Chinese imports in April, which were met with swift retaliation from China.

The tit-for-tat moves pushed the countries perilously close to a full-scale trade war, making trade in most products "economically unviable", triggering market volatility, and amplifying uncertainties for businesses in the two countries and beyond, he said.

However, steep consumer prices in the US, the loss of agricultural sales to China, especially that of soybeans, and China's rare-earth export controls forced a White House reassessment of the situation, he added.