China’s Commerce Ministry confirmed Wednesday that Beijing has agreed to buy 200 Boeing planes, in what will be the U.S. manufacturer’s largest plane sale to China in nearly a decade.
The agreement 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 American company, but Chinese officials initially avoided any comment.
It happened on Wednesday. “Aviation is a key area for deepening mutually beneficial cooperation between China and the United States,” said a statement issued by the Ministry of Commerce.
Mr. Trump told reporters on his flight back to Washington last Friday that China had agreed to buy “about 400, 450 engines, 200 planes and a promise of up to 750 if they did a good job.”
Kelly Ortberg, CEO of Boeing, was part of the delegation of American business leaders who accompanied Mr. Trump to Beijing. “We hope that further commitments will follow after this first tranche,” the company said in a statement after the summit.
Boeing has long sought to re-enter the Chinese market. Nearly one in seven planes in circulation today flies in China.
But the company’s relations with Beijing deteriorated after the global grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX 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 unfulfilled order for 29 737 MAXs.
Boeing began delivering planes to China again in 2024, but that stalled last year due to Mr. Trump’s escalating tariffs.
It is still unclear which aircraft models Beijing has agreed to purchase.
The two-day summit between Mr Trump and Mr Xi produced few major results, although the US president brought back a handful of other trade deals. Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, said in an interview with Bloomberg News after the summit that he also expected China to agree to buy more U.S. agricultural products.
But the main sources of friction have not been resolved. China’s Commerce Ministry spokesperson alluded to one of them on Saturday, telling reporters in Beijing that the United States and China had discussed specific tariff rates at the summit.
The spokesperson said China hoped the United States would “honor its commitments and ensure that” the level of U.S. tariffs on China “does not exceed the stipulated level” at a meeting last fall in South Korea, when the two sides agreed to a truce on tariff rates.
This is the second time a Chinese official has said tariffs were part of discussions last week. Mr. Trump, for his part, told reporters: “We have not discussed tariffs.”
Alexandra Stevenson contributed to the reports, and Read you contributed to the research.
