During Donald Trump’s first term, U.S. trade negotiators met a familiar interlocutor in China: Liu He, a Harvard-educated, English-speaking consultant, who supported many of the economic reforms Washington sought over the years.

Now, as the United States and China look for a way out of a complete trade war, Beijing’s delegation will be led by Deputy Prime Minister He Lifeng.

"He could be a more difficult interlocutor for Americans," said Andrew Gilholm, head of China's analysis consulting for risk control.

Trump claimed on Thursday that “China is very interested in reaching an agreement”, Gilholm added: “China is willing and able to suffer longer than the political pain of the White House.”

Xi Jinping's trade tsar will meet with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on Saturday in Geneva, the first high-end, face-to-face talks since Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs last month. Since then, the United States and China have raised taxes, threatening an effective embargo between the world's two largest economies.

He is 70 years old and is part of a core party dance, and his connection to XI can go back decades. He worked under the leadership of the XI of Fujian Province and began his unprecedented third-year term as President of China in March 2023.

Neil Thomas, an elite Chinese political expert at the Asian Institute of Social Policy, said such close associations were "positive" to negotiations. "It is important that he gets to know XI personally to achieve these negotiations and be able to reliably represent the direction Xi Jinping wants to take on our relationship with China," Thomas said.

A Chinese political adviser said his focus on foreign wars has increased significantly over the past year, and he demanded not to be named as Xi Jinping refocused his leadership on resolving slow economic growth.

In recent months, he has held dozens of meetings with foreign officials and business leaders, including Goldman Sachs president John Waldron, Pfizer chairman Albert Bourla, Apple boss Tim Cook and NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang.

According to a person familiar with certain meetings, he gradually looked more comfortable in these situations as Beijing urged U.S. corporate leaders to help affect tensions in the White House, and his news has become "friendly."

The person said that during the meeting with Huang, the deputy prime minister talked about his family’s Fujian background - a language that speaks in Fujian and Taiwan, including tech billionaires.

But others who met him said that unlike Liu, he seemed to speak a little English. Although many Chinese officials often refuse to speak foreign languages ​​at formal meetings and choose interpreters instead, many do know English.

According to one who knows him, he met "typical Chinese technocrats", friendly, but full of confidence in China's advantages and some kind of "detachment".

Another businessman familiar with him described him as a "staunch" supporter of state-owned enterprises that constitute the bedrock of Xi Jinping's state-driven economic policies and "black and white thinkers."

He studied economics and held senior positions in the northeast of the country in Fujian and Tianjin. Thomas said his decades of experience in "everyday economic issues" and academic background "is not always appreciated." "He is not familiar with economic and trade policies," he added.

In 2014, he was promoted to vice chairman of China's National Development and Reform Commission, according to Minxin Pei, editor of China Leadership Monitor.

Three years later, he was promoted to NDRC Chairman. While at the National Planner, he oversaw the early days of Xi Jinping's Hallmark foreign policy plan's Belt and Road Infrastructure Plan.

In the second half of 2023, state media began calling him a leadership position among the top Communist Party organizations to oversee the financial system while his government responsibilities led economic and trade affairs with the United States.

Before meeting Bessent and Greer, he will be supported by Deputy Finance Soldier and former member of the former LIU negotiation team, Liao Min, while former European Education lawyer Li Chenggang was appointed as the World Trade Organization representative in Beijing last month.

Both are English speakers and are very familiar with Beijing's efforts to resist the potential trade war shocks.

However, analysts expressed doubts about the opportunity for a breakthrough in Switzerland.

"All of this will eventually be decided above them (he and Bennister). In the model of the "one-phase" agreement reached during the first term of the U.S. president, "there is a credit to Trump's willingness to accept another narrow, fragile, deficit-focused deal."

Beijing sees Bessent as a "balanced professional" in stark contrast to some of Washington's "extreme hawks", whose team seems to have the right to "initial engagement, not thorough negotiations," Gao Jian, a foreign policy expert at the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University.

He added that one of Beijing’s creeds before the negotiations was that “appropriate cannot buy peace, and compromise cannot gain respect”.

Other reports about Zheng Lun in Hong Kong