Natalie Kittrow

From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittroweth.

This is The Daily.

President Trump's trade war against China has so far proven much harder to win than his administration ever let on.

And it's only getting worse as China undertakes its most aggressive act of retaliation to date.

Today, my colleague Keith Bradshaw on a potential turning point in the standoff as President Trump meets this week with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in what will be their first talks since the trade war began.

It's Wednesday, October 29th.

Keith, I think a lot of us, frankly, started to feel as though this trade war may have finally died down.

I think we were lulled, perhaps, into a false sense of calm when there wasn't that much news on this for months.

But then, all of a sudden, things seemed to heat back up again.

So give us a sense of the state of the relationship right now.

And what are the main sticking points right now in these negotiations?

Like, what do we expect to come up in that meeting?

Can you just unpack what exactly China did?

Because this was something that I think a lot of people were talking about as a major escalation.

There were new restrictions, right, on these rare earth minerals.

These are critically important to, you know, everything from missiles to cars.

We need them.

And China was saying you can't have them.

What exactly happened?

I have to say, for me, this is like a control freak's approach to trade restrictions.