President Donald Trump on Monday disputed his ambassador’s account of a conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping about buying American weapons. The conflicting descriptions followed Xi’s recent visit to Washington, while the State Department said no offer or plan to sell arms to China exists.
The account first surfaced publicly on Fox News Sunday on September 27. In an interview with host Shannon Bream, U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue said Trump had asked Xi at some point whether China wanted to buy American weapons. Perdue raised the subject while discussing U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan, which Beijing opposes. He did not specify when the exchange allegedly occurred or describe Xi’s response.
A reporter put Perdue’s account to Trump in the Oval Office the following day. Trump said he had not heard of such an exchange and would ask the ambassador about it. He suggested Perdue might have meant Taiwan. Trump added that China would probably be interested in American equipment, but said he had not discussed selling it to Xi.
The State Department rejected the prospect of a sale in a statement reported Monday by ABC News and the Associated Press. It said U.S. law prohibits arms sales to China and that no offer or plan to sell arms to China exists. The department’s statement addressed both the ambassador’s account and the possibility of a transaction: officials said none was under consideration.
American restrictions on military sales to China date to the U.S. response to the Chinese government’s suppression of protests in 1989. Current State Department regulations place China among destinations for which the United States maintains a policy of denying approvals for transfers of defense articles and services. A sale to Beijing would confront those longstanding legal and policy barriers.
Taiwan is central to the exchange Perdue described. The United States supplies defensive weapons to Taiwan, while China claims the island and objects to American arms sales there. In his television interview, Perdue presented Trump’s alleged question to Xi as part of a discussion about why Washington sells weapons abroad. Trump, however, disputed that he asked Xi about a sale to China.
Perdue gave no date or further details for the alleged question. Trump did not provide a separate account of the discussion beyond denying that arms sales to China came up. No public account from Xi confirming such an exchange had emerged in Monday’s reporting.
The disagreement leaves the substance of that private conversation unresolved. Perdue said the president raised the prospect of China buying U.S. weapons; Trump said he did not. The State Department’s position was explicit: no arms offer had been made, no sale was planned and existing U.S. restrictions remained in place.