US–China Relations, Explained Through the Data
2026-09-03 · by Jordi Fuster
No bilateral relationship gets written about more than the United States and China, and few are harder to summarize in one line. Here's what the last two years actually did to it, and what WorldRelat's own number says about where things stand.
The tariff rollercoaster
The reciprocal tariffs both countries imposed on each other spiked as high as 125% in April 2025 — a level that effectively made large categories of trade uneconomical — before both sides pulled back to around 10% by that May. That kind of whiplash is unusual even by the standards of the US-China trade relationship, and it set the tone for the following year: neither government wanting a full break, but neither willing to simply let the other's tariffs stand either.
The clearest de-escalation came out of an October 2025 meeting between presidents Trump and Xi in Busan, South Korea, which produced a one-year suspension of Chinese export controls on rare earths — materials that sit at the center of nearly every advanced electronics and defense supply chain — along with general export licenses for some rare-earth elements. It's a real truce, but a narrow and time-limited one; as of early 2026, the fuller details of what was actually agreed still hadn't been made public, according to China Briefing's tracking of the relationship.
Trade volumes tell a more sobering story than the truce headlines do: Chinese exports to the US fell close to 20% in 2025, from roughly $536 billion to $431.6 billion, and hadn't meaningfully recovered in the months following the October agreement.
The parts of the relationship that don't make the trade headlines
Trade policy is only the most visible layer. On the US side, 2026's National Defense Authorization Act folded in the BIOSECURE Act, barring federal agencies from procuring from a list of Chinese biotech firms, while the FIGHT China Act expanded outbound investment restrictions into high-performance computing and hypersonic technology. None of that reads like a relationship heading toward warmth — and China Briefing's own assessment is that a bipartisan hawkish posture toward China remains the dominant mood on Capitol Hill regardless of which party controls it.
So why does WorldRelat score it 7.62 out of 10?
That number tends to surprise people who've been reading tariff headlines all year, and it's worth explaining rather than just reporting. WorldRelat's score comes from sentiment analysis of the general written record of the relationship, not a live index of trade disputes — and the two countries' relationship, taken as a whole, still reads as a deep, functioning, mutually load-bearing one: the largest bilateral trade relationship on earth, dense diplomatic contact, constant negotiation rather than silence. Sentiment analysis reads that ongoing, high-stakes engagement as a positive signal, even when a lot of what's being negotiated is adversarial. It's a genuinely useful distinction: "conflictual" and "disengaged" are not the same thing, and a score built from language tends to separate the two better than a single trade-war headline does.
That's also, in miniature, exactly why WorldRelat gives every relationship its own full page rather than a single global "friend or rival" label — the real picture almost always needs more than one number to make sense of it, and the US–China relationship might be the single best example on the entire site.