China’s move was welcomed on Friday by the Trump administration, which said it would help ease tensions ahead of the next round of talks.

“The really good part about this is there is some relaxation in the air with China exempting some tariffs. We’ve returned the favor and the negotiations are moving along nicely,” Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, said on Friday.

“And as the president said yesterday, we’re always available for a good deal.”

Some farmers in the United States have been hit hard by tariffs imposed by Beijing on American goods, a retaliation against the White House’s mounting tariffs on Chinese goods. The 2020 presidential election is approaching, and the farming vote was critical in some of the states that supported Mr. Trump in 2016. At Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate, several candidates attacked Mr. Trump over the trade war’s impact on farmers.

Mr. Trump’s advisers say they will continue to press China for a transformative deal, but many are also eager to calm tensions and avoid further tariff increases that might rock equity markets this year. They have considered striking an arrangement that would walk back the latest tranche of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on $112 billion of Chinese goods — leaving tariffs on at least $250 billion of products in place — in return for substantial purchases of soybeans, pork and other products, people familiar with the matter said. It’s not yet clear that China will make such an official offer at the bargaining table, however.

The easing of agricultural tariffs could also help China with its own problems. Food inflation has been rising as the Chinese authorities battle an epidemic of swine fever, which has forced China to cull more than a million pigs. Pork is a staple of the Chinese diet.