US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he will hold his first introductory call with his Chinese counterpart on Friday, and reiterated longstanding US calls for its biggest geostrategic rival to rebalance its economy toward domestic consumption. “I do have my first call with my Chinese counterpart tomorrow morning, so I look forward to a very productive discussion,” Bessent said on Thursday in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Bloomberg Surveillance. Bessent did not identify his counterpart by name. His predecessor, Janet Yellen, engaged with Vice-Premier He Lifeng, meeting him in Beijing last April. A Treasury spokesperson did not respond to a request to specify who Bessent would speak to on Friday. Bessent said his first message will be that “we want to work together”, and that “we really want to put a stop” to the inflow of precursor ingredients for fentanyl from China. US President Donald Trump earlier this month slapped a 10 per cent surtax on goods from China, citing concerns over the illicit fentanyl trade. The new Treasury chief effectively picked up a baton from Yellen in calling on China to stop relying on exports to propel its economic growth. Beijing has consistently defended its economic policies and argued that China’s success in trade is a result of free market competition and comparative advantage, not subsidies. “This is really just an introductory conversation,” Bessent said of the call. “But as we go down the road, the Chinese need to rebalance their economy in favour of consumption,” he said. “They are suppressing the consumer in favour of the business community.” While Bessent might have had the opportunity of meeting Chinese officials next week at the Group of 20 (G20) finance ministers’ meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, he plans to skip the forum to focus on domestic priorities. He said “the readout we’ve gotten” from China is “he’s not attending either”, referring to his China counterpart. In the past, China sent its finance minister - a lower-ranked senior official than He - to gatherings such as a G20 finance meeting. Bessent noted he will have the chance to meet counterparts from around the world at the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which are planned for April. Asked about China’s foreign-exchange policy, Bessent - who specialised in currency trading during his career as a hedge-fund investor - said the yuan is a “very difficult currency to value”. On any academic model, such as a purchasing-power parity calculation, “it’s cheap”, he said. He also pointed to pressures for funds to flow out of the country, saying that Chinese people currently subject to capital controls “want to get some of their money out of the country”. “The X factor” with regard to the yuan is questions about whether foreign investors putting money into the country would be able to withdraw it after a period of years, Bessent said. “So it’s very difficult to come up with a point value of the currency,” he summed up. Bessent reiterated that the “US still has a strong dollar policy. But that does not mean that bilaterally, other countries can weaken their currencies versus the dollar or manipulate their currencies”. As to whether Trump plans more tariffs on China, Bessent said: “I’m not going to give away his negotiating hand.” Kevin Hassett, Trump’s National Economic Council director, estimated during a White House news briefing on Thursday that the new 10 per cent tariff on China would generate US$500 billion to US$1 trillion over the next 10 years. The Chinese government objects that the Trump administration is using the fight against fentanyl as a “pretext” for increasing tariffs, Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the country’s embassy in Washington said separately on Thursday.