President Trump says he’s negotiating a deal for China to address a promise it made to President Obama — and broke: to stop hacking and stealing information from American businesses to give to Chinese ones.



But while the official White House line is that the two countries have a three-month deadline to reach a new deal before the US raises tariffs significantly, China’s official description includes neither a deadline nor any mention of hacking or intellectual property.

Both sides do agree, at least, that Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping dined together Saturday at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, where they discussed a temporary halt to proposed tariffs against each other. They also discussed North Korea and cracking down on the opiate fentanyl.

According to a White House statement, the two also “agreed to immediately begin negotiations on structural changes,” including on “cyber intrusions and cyber theft,” and that if they don’t reach an agreement within 90 days, the US will raise tariffs on Chinese goods from 10% to 25%.

“Cybersecurity, cyber hacking — those are structural issues that have to be addressed — essential. But China is agreeing to address them, and that's important,” Larry Kudlow, Trump’s economic adviser, said of the talks in a call with reporters on Monday. “It's on their list. So I can't announce compliance; I can just say that it's front and center, and President Xi acknowledged that.”

It’s not clear, however, how seriously China’s taking the Trump proposal. Its Ministry of Foreign Affairs mentioned neither a deadline nor anything related to cyberactivity or intellectual property in its description of Trump and Xi’s meeting. The Chinese Embassy didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Such a deal, if it were to happen, would evoke the Obama–Xi agreement of 2015, the high watermark of Obama’s cyberdiplomacy with China. In it, the two countries agreed that “neither country’s government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property” in order to give it to their own businesses. While both countries are among the world's powerhouses when it comes to hacking to spy on foreign targets, the US has long insisted it doesn’t do so for the sake of its private businesses and expressed indignation that China does.