Donald Trump offered to sell weapons to China while hosting its leader, Xi Jinping, last week, the US ambassador to China said on Sunday.

David Perdue told Fox News on Sunday: “President Trump continues to say, hey, we sell arms to other people around the world. He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some at one point.”

On Monday, Chinese state media praised the “extraordinary level of courtesy” that Trump had shown Xi on the Chinese leader’s visit to Washington.

The extraordinary claim came during an interview about US policy on Taiwan, which has been waiting for months for Trump to approve a new arms sales ⁠package worth $14bn (£10.5bn), after a record multibillion-dollar deal was unveiled in December last year.

Trump’s level of commitment to protecting Taiwan has previously been questioned. At a meeting with Xi in Beijing in May, ⁠Trump said he was keeping the $14bn Taiwan arms sales package in abeyance, describing it as a “very good negotiating chip” in dealings with China.

Washington has long maintained a strategically ambiguous stance on whether it would defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion. But under the decades-old Taiwan Relations Act, it is required to provide Taipei with sufficient military equipment to defend itself.

Beijing has repeatedly said it “resolutely opposes” Washington’s arms sales to the island democracy, which it regards as a breakaway province, despite never having ruled it, and has not renounced the use of force to take. During their Washington meeting last week, Xi urged Trump to oppose “Taiwan independence”, according to a readout from the official Chinese news agency Xinhua.

After Perdue’s interview, the White House told the New York Times the US had no plans to sell arms to China, while the state department said: “US law prohibits arms sales to China and there is no offer or plan to sell arms to China.”

China is a net exporter of weapons. Of the arms that it does import, most come from Russia, but the volume is rapidly falling thanks to advances in China’s own military manufacturing capacity. China’s arms imports fell by 72% between 2021 and 2025 compared with the previous five years, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Before the interview, the Taiwanese deputy foreign minister Chen Ming-chi spoke of the severe military threat China posed.

“Taiwan faces a severe situation in the Taiwan strait. Even though China’s economy is declining, it continues investing more resources into building military capacity. Under ‌this context, the US very much understands our defence needs,” he told reporters in Taipei.

On Sunday, a Taiwanese official, Shen Yu-chung, also pushed back on what he said was an attempt by Beijing to “falsely claim that the Chinese Communist party and the US were allies” in the second world war. A fact sheet released by the White House after the Trump-Xi summit had said China and the US “fought side by side to win” in the war.

China’s government during the second world war was the Republic of China led by Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang’s government fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the Chinese civil war to the communists, who established the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

In recent years Taiwan has sought to emphasise its history of fighting alongside western democratic allies as it hopes to bolster international support against aggression from Beijing.

Trump ​has not mentioned the sale ‌since last week’s summit, saying ‌only on Saturday that Xi understands his position on Taiwan.

Perdue himself told CNBC ​on Friday that there had been ​no change in Taiwan policy by Trump, including on arms ​sales.

Reuters contributed to this report