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President Donald Trump escalated trade tensions with China on Tuesday, accusing Beijing of intentionally halting purchases of American soybeans and threatening to end U.S. imports of Chinese cooking oil in response.
“I believe that China purposefully not buying our Soybeans, and causing difficulty for our Soybean Farmers, is an Economically Hostile Act,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “We are considering terminating business with China having to do with Cooking Oil, and other elements of Trade, as retribution. As an example, we can easily produce Cooking Oil ourselves, we don’t need to purchase it from China.”
China has long been the largest buyer of U.S. soybeans. The American Soybean Association says soybeans are the nation’s top agricultural export, worth about $24.5 billion last year. Roughly $12.6 billion of those exports went to China in 2024, according to Farm Action. Major soybean-producing states include Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Indiana.
China has shifted purchases to Brazil and Argentina since the spring. At the same time, the United States imported about 1.27 million metric tons of used cooking oil from China in 2024, about 43 percent of China’s total exports of used cooking oil, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The threat is not the first toward China in recent days. The president also suggested on Oct. 10 that he might refuse to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping during an upcoming trip to South Korea after China restricted rare earth mineral exports. He warned that he could impose a 100 percent tariff on all Chinese goods, in addition to the 30 percent tariffs already in place.
“It is impossible to believe that China would have taken such an action, but they have, and the rest is History,” Trump said in an earlier post on Truth Social.
Two days later, President Trump took a more optimistic tone, writing on Truth Social, “it will all be fine” with China and calling Xi “highly respected.”
But on Tuesday, his focus changed yet again during a meeting with Argentina’s President Javier Milei.
“We have to be careful with China,” the president stated. “Look, I have a great relationship with President Xi, but sometimes it gets testy because China likes to take advantage of people and they can’t take advantage of us.”
