Since President Trump began his second term in January, no high-level officials from the United States have met with their counterparts in China, even as the world’s two largest economies have taken turns imposing steep tariffs on each other.
In the absence of official meetings, Senator Steve Daines of Montana has cast himself as a go-between. Mr. Daines met with Vice Premier He Lifeng, who oversees many economic issues for China, on Saturday and was set to meet Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-highest official, on Sunday.
In an interview with The New York Times on Saturday after the meeting with Mr. He, Mr. Daines, a Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he urged China to take effective action to halt the export of chemical precursors for fentanyl.
“I met with President Trump a few days before I came over, and he was pleased that I was coming to communicate his ‘America First’ message and, importantly, to make sure that Chinese leaders knew the seriousness of the fentanyl issue, and the role that China can play in stopping the shipment of precursors to the Mexican cartels,” Mr. Daines said.
Chinese officials have said that the fentanyl crisis is rooted in an American failure to curb demand for the drug, and that Beijing has taken effective measures to limit shipments of fentanyl and its chemical precursors. China’s cabinet issued a report earlier this month on its fentanyl measures, and Mr. Daines said this was being studied by American officials.
Mr. Daines said he was trying to lay the groundwork for a meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. “This visit is the first step to arrange and set up the next step, which will be a very important meeting between President Xi and President Trump — when that occurs, I don’t know, where it occurs, I don’t know.”
The White House has not named Mr. Daines as acting on its behalf. But Mr. Daines is one of Mr. Trump’s top allies in Congress. He was the first member of the Republican leadership in the Senate to endorse Mr. Trump in 2023 for a second term at a time when many Republican senators were leery of seeing Mr. Trump return to the White House.
“Given Senator Daines’s relationship to Donald Trump, China certainly wants to learn from him about Trump’s China policy intentions — whether he still wants to make a deal with China, and if so, what the deal would look like,” said Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.
China also wants Senator Daines to “bring a message to Donald Trump that China wants to sit down to talk with the U.S. side and to avoid further escalation of the tensions,” Mr. Wu said.
Mr. Trump has imposed 20 percent tariffs on goods from China and threatened more. China wants to head off further tariffs.
“There’s a window of opportunity before early April for China and the U.S. to engage each other, and Senator Daines’s visit could play a pivotal role,” Mr. Wu said.
Mr. Daines said that he was not focusing on tariffs with China, because the Office of the United States Trade Representative has not yet finished a policy review.
Mr. Trump has said he plans to meet with Mr. Xi, without specifying details. China has said nothing publicly about a meeting. But the contacts between working-level administration officials that typically precede such a meeting have been absent so far during Mr. Trump’s second term.
Mr. Xi makes all important decisions in China, particularly on foreign policy. That makes summits with American presidents particularly important in setting the trajectory of bilateral relations. The two leaders met in 2017 when Mr. Xi went to Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, and Mr. Trump went to China.
The lack of engagement with Washington until now has led some in Beijing to begin to doubt whether Mr. Trump is sincere in his expressed desire to meet Mr. Xi, said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington.
“They see him changing his position rapidly on a number of issues,” Ms. Sun said. “That translates into an almost fatalism for the Chinese, that they should aim to prepare for the worst case scenario, that’s their conclusion.”
Mr. Daines said he also expressed concern about China’s barriers to imports, beyond just tariffs, during his visit to Beijing. He declined to provide any specifics. But Montana politicians have long argued that China’s intermittent halts on imports of beef from the state are unfair trade barriers, and not the result of any actual concerns about mad cow disease, as Beijing contends.
Mr. Daines lived for six years in southern China in the 1990s as a project manager for Procter & Gamble, the American consumer products giant.
This weekend’s trip is Mr. Daines’s sixth to China since his election to the Senate in 2014, making him one of the few members of Congress who have continued traveling to the country even as relations have deteriorated.