Trump asked Xi if China wants to buy American weapons
Story By Staff Reporter
US ambassador David Perdue says Donald Trump offered to sell weapons to China. The offer came during Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington last week.
Perdue made the claim on Fox News on Sunday. “President Trump continues to say, hey, we sell arms to other people around the world. He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some at one point.”
On Monday, Chinese state media praised the “extraordinary level of courtesy” Trump showed Xi during the visit.
Perdue was discussing US policy on Taiwan when he made the remark. The island has waited months for Trump to approve a new $14bn (£10.5bn) arms package. The US announced a record multibillion-dollar deal in December last year.
People have questioned how far Trump will go to protect Taiwan. At a May meeting with Xi in Beijing, he said he was holding the $14bn package back. He called it a “very good negotiating chip” in dealings with China.
Washington has long stayed strategically ambiguous on whether it would defend Taiwan if China invaded. Still, the decades-old Taiwan Relations Act requires the US to give Taipei enough military equipment to defend itself.
Beijing “resolutely opposes” US arms sales to Taiwan. It regards the island as a breakaway province, though it has never ruled it. China has not renounced the use of force to take it. Xinhua, China’s official news agency, says Xi urged Trump to oppose “Taiwan independence” at last week’s meeting.
After Perdue’s interview, the White House told the New York Times it had no plans to sell arms to China. The state department said: “US law prohibits arms sales to China and there is no offer or plan to sell arms to China.”
China exports more weapons than it imports. Russia supplies most of what it does buy, but that volume is falling fast as China’s own arms industry improves. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports a 72% drop in China’s arms imports between 2021 and 2025. It compared that period with the previous five years.
Before the interview, Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister, Chen Ming-chi, warned of the severe military threat from China.
“Taiwan faces a severe situation in the Taiwan strait. Even though China’s economy is declining, it continues investing more resources into building military capacity. Under this context, the US very much understands our defence needs,” he told reporters in Taipei.
On Sunday, Taiwanese official Shen Yu-chung pushed back on a Beijing claim. He said Beijing was trying to “falsely claim that the Chinese Communist party and the US were allies” in the second world war. A White House fact sheet after the Trump-Xi summit said China and the US “fought side by side to win” the war.
During the war, the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek governed China. Chiang’s government fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the civil war to the communists. They founded the People’s Republic of China that same year.
Taiwan has recently stressed its history of fighting alongside western democracies. It hopes to build international support against Beijing’s aggression.
Trump has not mentioned the sale since the summit. On Saturday, he said only that Xi understands his position on Taiwan. Perdue told CNBC on Friday that Trump had not changed Taiwan policy, including on arms sales.
Reporting based on original coverage by The Guardian and Reuters.
