China’s Commerce Ministry confirmed on Wednesday that Beijing had agreed to buy 200 Boeing planes, in what will be the largest single sale of the US manufacturer’s planes to China in nearly a decade.
The deal came out of President Trump’s summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing last week. Mr. Trump and Boeing had announced that Beijing would reopen its market to the US company, but Chinese officials had initially avoided comment.
It came on Wednesday. “Aviation is a key area for deepening mutually beneficial cooperation between China and the United States,” said a statement released by the Ministry of Commerce.
Mr. Trump told reporters last Friday on his return flight to Washington that China had agreed to buy “about 400, 450 engines, 200 planes and a promise of up to 750 if they do a good job.”
Kelly Ortberg, Boeing’s chief executive, was among the delegation of American business leaders who accompanied Mr. Trump to Beijing. “We expect further commitments to follow this initial tranche,” the company said in a statement after the summit.
Boeing has long tried to re-enter the Chinese market. Almost one in seven aircraft in use today flies in China.
But the company’s relationship with Beijing faltered after the worldwide grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX plane following two crashes less than five months apart, which killed a total of 346 people. In 2020, citing the global coronavirus pandemic, China canceled an unfilled order for 29 737 MAX jets.
Boeing began delivering planes to China again in 2024, but it stalled last year amid the escalation of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.
It is still unclear which aircraft models Beijing has agreed to buy.
The two-day summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi offered little in the way of major breakthroughs, although the US president brought home a handful of other trade deals. Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, said in an interview with Bloomberg News after the summit that he also expected China to agree to buy more US agricultural products.
But key sources of friction were left unresolved. The spokesman for China’s Ministry of Commerce alluded to one of them on Saturday, telling reporters in Beijing that the US and China had discussed specific tariffs during the summit.
The spokesman said China hoped the U.S. would “fulfill its obligations and ensure that” the level of U.S. tariffs on China “would not exceed the level set” at a meeting last fall in South Korea, where the two sides had agreed to a truce on tariffs.
This is the second time a Chinese official said tariffs were part of the discussions last week. Mr. Trump, for his part, has told reporters “We did not discuss tariffs.”
Alexandra Stevenson the contribution of reporting, and Like you the contribution of research.
