China has rejected Trump administration claims that it had offered to cut its trade surplus with the US by $200bn, China’s foreign ministry said on Friday.

Various US news outlets, citing anonymous sources, had reported that Chinese trade officials, meeting with US counterparts in Washington this week, had acceded to Trump demands to cut its $375bn annual trade surplus, in part by increasing purchases of American goods.

“This rumor is not true. This I can confirm to you,” the foreign ministry spokesman, Lu Kang, told a regular news briefing.

However, the ministry spokesman said that the trade consultations between the Chinese vice-premier Liu He and the US treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, and trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, were “constructive”.

Despite China’s rejection of the administration’s claims of a deal, which were unattributed in news reports, Beijing is striking a conciliatory pose in negotiations to prevent the current tit-for-tat dispute involving hundreds of billions of dollars in punitive tariffs from escalating into a full-scale global trade war.

China announced that it would end its anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigation into imports of sorghum and reopen its review of Qualcomm’s proposed $44bn acquisition of NXP Semiconductors NV – a deal that was put on hold as trade tensions worsened earlier this year.

Last weekend, Trump tweeted that he wanted to help Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE “get back into business, fast” after it was banned from doing business in the US over violation of North Korean and Iranian sanctions.

In 2012, ZTE was identified in a congressional report that raised concerns over thefts of US intellectual property by Chinese companies tied to the Chinese government.

On Wednesday, the FBI’s director, Christopher Wray, told an appropriations committee hearing of the agency’s concern over “any company beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values … gaining positions of power inside our telecommunications network”.

But the cost of the administration’s proposed tariffs are already being felt by US industry. During an earnings call, Campbell Soup’s finance chief, Anthony DiSilvestro, said steel tariffs were part of the company’s $393m quarterly loss announced on Friday.

Two months ago, Ross held up a can of Campbell’s during a CNBC appearance to illustrate what he claimed would be the minimal effect of aluminium and steel tariffs. He described US companies’ anxiety over tariffs as “a lot to do about nothing”.

But Campbell’s DiSilvestro said tariffs were partly to blame for the company’s woes.

“At this stage, given what we know about accelerating cost inflation in part due to the anticipated impact of import tariffs and the continuing headwind on transportation and logistics cost, we expect our margins will be down in fiscal 2019,” he said. Shares in the company dropped 11%.

Tensions over US-China trade is also being felt in other major economies. On Friday, Japan told the WTO it was reserving the right to impose tariffs on the US if it does not gain exemptions on proposed tariffs on US aluminium and steel imports.

Japan stopped short of lodging a formal complaint with the global trade body, but the move is considered significant in view of Shinzō Abe’s efforts to forge a close relationship with Trump.

Japan said it would decide whether to impose counter tariffs on American goods “after carefully examining the US relevant measures and their impacts on Japanese industries”.

But despite conciliatory signals coming from the US and Chinese trade delegations, a US threat to impose $150bn in tariffs and penalties on Chinese imports and Chinese threats to counter-target US agricultural products, largely in Trump-supporting states, remain in place.

Before meeting with Trump on Thursday, Liu reiterated China’s willingness to “appropriately handle and resolve trade issues felt by both sides on a basis of mutual benefit”.

But before that meeting, Trump expressed doubts that agreement to avoid a trade war would be reached. “Will that be successful? I tend to doubt it. The reason I doubt it is because China’s become very spoiled.”