On Saturday, US President Donald Trump said, following a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, that China had agreed to buy more US products.

“If the US flip-flops again in the negotiations, the promises to buy American agriculture products will also be overturned,” Taoran Notes said.

It added that China would have to consider its domestic demand and the opinions of domestic companies before buying US agricultural products.

The commentary was published ahead of next week’s revival of trade talks, when American negotiators will visit Beijing.

A lot will ride on how the US government handles the supply ban on Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies, sources have told the South China Morning Post.

China and the United States agreed to return to the negotiating table to end their costly trade war after their leaders reached a tentative truce on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Osaka last week.

Trump announced after his meeting with Xi that he would put on hold new threatened tariffs on US$300 billion of Chinese goods and allow American suppliers to resume selling parts to Huawei.

In exchange, China would buy a “tremendous” amount of agricultural products from the US, he said. Both sides would take time to work out a final agreement to end their trade dispute.

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He said Beijing wanted first to see how – and if – the Trump administration would ease the supply ban on Huawei, as promised by Trump.

He said the White House probably would make an announcement “in the next couple of days” on the conditions under which American companies would be allowed to resume supplying the Chinese tech giant.

The Chinese would then commit to buying American agricultural products.

If the negotiators are unable to resolve the issues, the talks could “break down immediately”, with Washington going ahead with new tariffs on US$300 billion of Chinese products, the source warned.

A Chinese source also confirmed that American negotiators would return to Beijing next week to iron out the details of what was discussed.

Trump’s announcement on Huawei took many American bureaucrats by surprise, the American source said. The administration was now trying to work out how to implement the decision.

As of Thursday, the restrictions on Huawei remained in effect and no US business could supply parts or components to the Chinese company without a special licence.

Some American senators criticised Trump’s announcement as a mistake. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, however, said that only “low-tech consumer chips” would be sold to Huawei.

China insists US must remove all trade war tariffs as part of deal, says commerce ministry spokesman

The source said the US administration was still debating how to ease the restrictions. Specifically, it was weighing whether to extend the 90-day reprieve on the ban beyond August 13 or establish a special approval process.

Even if the two sides can come up with a solution, they will still face a daunting task finding ways to narrow their other differences and work out a final deal.

Among the issues still to be resolved is how China would overhaul its state-owned enterprises and its industrial policy to create a level playing field for American companies.

Trade war truce does little to boost public confidence in China due to lack of trust in Trump

Such a move would require the Trump administration to give up its insistence that some levies remained in place to ensure Beijing honoured the deal. The US had argued that these levies should be lifted only when China made progress on certain agreed-to goals.

“If both sides are able to reach an agreement, the tariffs that have been imposed have to be removed completely. China’s attitude on the issue is clear and consistent,” Gao said, adding that both countries’ trade teams had been in touch about resuming talks.

Despite the difficulties, China remained cautiously optimistic that a deal would be reached, a source close to the Chinese government said.

“There will be a deal at a time before Trump’s presidential election run, though the talks process will be painful,” the Chinese source said.

On Wednesday, Trump accused China and Europe of manipulating currencies, adding another layer of complexity to the negotiations.

“China and Europe playing big currency manipulation game and pumping money into their system in order to compete with USA,” the US president wrote in a Twitter post.

China promises ‘faster’ financial opening up days after trade war truce

“We should MATCH, or continue being the dummies who sit back and politely watch as other countries continue to play their games – as they have for many years!”

Beijing and Washington have had 11 rounds of back-and-forth sit-down trade talks since January, but negotiations collapsed in May with each side blaming the other for the failure to reach a deal.

Tensions escalated in May when the US put Huawei on its “entity list”, banning American firms from selling products to the Chinese giant – a global leader in 5G technology and a major customer for US tech companies.

Beijing retaliated by announcing it would launch an equivalent version of an “unreliable entity list”.

Trump has also said that China has agreed to buy a large amount of US agriculture products, starting immediately.

Although the truce set by the leaders would delay additional tariffs and restart talks, there is no deadline for concluding the negotiations.

Additional reporting by Orange Wang