US Treasury Secretary Bessent may skip the APEC finance ministers’ meeting in Hong Kong to focus on talks with Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng in Shenzhen ahead of President Trump’s November visit, SCMP sources reports

Bilateral negotiation ahead of a leader-level meeting is a well-worn sequence in US-China trade diplomacy: the working-level principals run continuous talks in the weeks prior, deliverables are assembled in advance, and the summit itself tends to ratify rather than originate. Skipping a multilateral forum to prioritise the bilateral channel is consistent with past episodes where the Treasury-led track, rather than the trade representative or commerce tracks, carried the substantive negotiation, a division of labour that has mattered because each track has historically produced different kinds of outcomes, macroeconomic and currency understandings from Treasury, tariff and enforcement mechanics from the trade side. A Shenzhen venue rather than a third country or formal multilateral setting signals the talks are at the drafting stage rather than the announcement stage. The historical pattern around such leader visits is a sequence of leaks, preparatory statements, and scope-setting on deliverables, with tariff truces, purchase commitments and market-access language recurring as the standard menu. The follow-ons are whether both sides confirm the talks, whether the agenda leaks before the visit, and any movement on the existing tariff and export-control architecture, since past rounds have tended to trade on headline optimism ahead of the meeting and on the specificity of the communique after it. Until there is paper, the signal is directional rather than tradeable in size.