Mexico and the United States were supposed to sit down next week for the fourth round of talks on their shared trade deal. They will not. Washington put the meeting off — “logistical reasons,” it said — because President Xi Jinping was meeting Donald Trump, and a G20 ministerial meeting was coming. Mexican officials hope to reschedule in October. No date has been set.
The excuse may be real. It is also beside the point. The thing hanging over these negotiations, according to reporting by EL PAÍS, is not scheduling but China — what Mexico will do about Chinese goods, Chinese investment and Chinese technology, and whether Washington approves of the answer.
Since taking office, Trump has insisted that Mexico serves as a springboard — his claim is that Chinese goods enter the United States through Mexico without paying American tariffs. President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government denies it. But denial has not stopped her from acting. Mexico has tightened customs checks, raised tariffs and launched an import-substitution programme under its Mexico Plan, all aimed at narrowing the trade gap with China.
The numbers refuse to cooperate
So far the effort shows nowhere in the statistics. In the first seven months of 2026, Chinese imports into Mexico rose 8% and passed $79.6 billion, while Mexican exports to China over the same period came to just over $8.6 billion, according to Banco de México figures carried by EL PAÍS. For every dollar of goods Mexico sells to China, it buys more than nine in return. Closing that gap is a stated priority of the Sheinbaum government. It is not yet a fact.
The American side of the ledger is the strong one. From January to July, Mexican exports to the United States topped $358.7 billion, held up by computer equipment and electronic components despite Trump’s tariffs on cars, aluminium, copper and goods outside the USMCA. The US Commerce Department counts Mexico as America’s top trading partner, at 17% of US purchases — ahead of Canada and Taiwan, with China fallen to fourth place, shipping about $156 billion worth into the American market over the period. The United States is also Mexico’s biggest supplier, selling it $156 billion in goods, a third of everything Mexico buys. China, with its $79.6 billion, holds 17%.
That trade is what stands behind the warning Sheinbaum has been giving Washington. Her government walks a narrow path: close ally of the United States in its quarrel with China, or target of American attack. It would rather be the first.
What each side wants
The talks themselves sit on shaky ground. Last July Washington refused to renew the USMCA for another sixteen years, which set off the rolling annual reviews now under way. The Americans want a smaller deficit with Mexico, more US content in North American manufacturing, and Asian investment kept out of sensitive sectors — technology and critical minerals named outright. The Mexicans want cheaper passage into the US market: the steel tariff cut from 50% to 25%, the car tariff from 25% to 15%, under the Section 232 regime.
Víctor Gómez Ayala, director of economic analysis at Casa de Bolsa Finamex, warns that Washington may spring last-minute demands, and names security as the likely one. “I think the Mexican delegation is focused on doing whatever is necessary to achieve the goal of reducing sectoral tariffs,” he said.
One Mexican industrialist, speaking anonymously, put the country’s position more bluntly: “Mexico should have had an industrial development plan that would have allowed it to negotiate with both sides ... They did not understand it in time and now they are at the mercy of the results of negotiations between China and the United States.” Mexico’s deputy undersecretary for foreign trade, Luis Rosendo Gutiérrez, says technical work with the US Trade Representative and the Commerce Department goes on daily, “defending our sovereignty.” Sovereignty, in this case, is a country waiting for two larger powers to finish their own argument before it learns the terms of its next one. The factories and customs houses that generate a third of a trillion dollars in cross-border trade will keep running whatever is decided; the tariff bills that land on them will be written somewhere else.