WASHINGTON — President Trump said Sunday that he will delay a scheduled increase in the tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports to allow negotiators more time to reach a comprehensive trade deal with Beijing, the most significant sign yet that Trump is eager to resolve a trade war with China that has rattled markets and companies around the globe.

The president’s decision to delay the increase in tariffs, which would have taken effect March 2, represents a gamble that his personal intervention can smooth the way to a final deal and quiet skeptics who fear he may be too quick to capitulate to the Chinese.

Trump said in a tweet Sunday evening that the United States had “made substantial progress in our trade talks with China on important structural issues including intellectual property protection, technology transfer, agriculture, services, currency, and many other issues.”

Trump, who did not set a new date for the tariff increase to take effect, also said he plans to host Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, to finalize terms of the agreement, should the talks continue to make headway. That meeting, which the president had weighed publicly Friday, is expected late next month.

The announcement capped a whirlwind week of talks between U.S. and Chinese officials that made sufficient progress for the Chinese delegation to extend through the weekend its Washington visit, which was scheduled to end Friday.

The U.S. and China have been negotiating since the president last year imposed tariffs on more than $250 billion in Chinese goods and threatened to do so on everything China sells into the American market – a move that would have significantly disrupted commerce between the world’s two largest economies.

The trade war has led to wild market gyrations over the past year, has drawn rebukes from American industries worried about damage to their supply chains and has contributed to what economists say is a marked slowing in global economic growth.

At the same time, Trump’s hard-line stance has cheered trade skeptics and China hard-liners who see the confrontation – after years of fruitless diplomatic outreach – as the best and possibly final chance to prevent China’s trade cheating from equipping it to replace the United States as the world’s most technologically advanced nation.

The two sides have not released many details about what the emerging agreement might look like. At issue in the trade clash are long-standing American complaints over Chinese trade practices, including requiring U.S. companies to surrender their trade secrets to do business in China and Chinese hackers’ widespread cybertheft of advanced technologies.

Trump also is demanding that China take immediate action to narrow the chronic imbalance in trade between the two countries. Last year, the U.S. ran a record deficit with China that will likely top $400 billion once the Commerce Department next month releases full-year figures for 2018.

Notably, the president Friday raised the possibility of including in the trade bargaining the fate of two Chinese telecommunications companies, Huawei and ZTE, that U.S. officials regard as national security threats.

The president’s comments suggested that the U.S. might bargain over criminal charges facing Huawei, which the Justice Department accuses of stealing American trade secrets, and its CFO, Meng Wanzhou, whom the U.S. seeks to extradite from Canada to face accusations of violating U.S. sanctions on Iran.

Including the fate of Huawei and Meng in the talks would be extraordinary because it would commingle a law enforcement action with trade negotiations.

On Sunday, Trump’s decision was welcomed by business leaders and those worried that his “America First” approach to trade could further hurt the economy.

“Encouraging news from @POTUS that progress is being made in a trade deal with China. Hopefully this leads to an agreement that stops China’s theft of US intellectual property and avoids a full blown trade war,” Sen. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., tweeted in response to Sunday’s announcement.

But the decision is also likely to stoke trade hard-liners’ concerns that the president is in too much of a rush to make a deal with Beijing. Fears about trade, among other issues, helped precipitate a major sell-off in the U.S. stock market late last year, though many of thoses losses have been reversed since.

In the view of so-called China hawks, the president’s quickening desire to close a deal with his Chinese counterpart threatens to make this one more example of American unwillingness to hang tough in the face of Chinese intransigence.

“We hear of major progress after every round of talks since the December summit yet always need more time,” Derek Scissors, a China expert at the American Enterprise Institute and occasional administration adviser, wrote in an email. “That’s because US-China talks are empty unless the U.S. has a credible enforcement mechanism. We still don’t. Without one, this is just a repeat of failed U.S.-China talks under Obama and Bush, plus tweets.”

In recent days, the president has hailed China’s willingness to sharply increase its purchases of American agricultural products, including corn and soybeans. But as critics warn that an open wallet represents Beijing’s standard strategy for soothing trade friction, the president has vowed to deliver a deal “better than any deal that anybody ever dreamed possible.”

As the time remaining before tariffs were due to rise to 25 percent from 10 percent at 12:01 a.m. on March 2, dwindled, it grew increasingly clear that Trump wanted a deal more than a showdown that could rock financial markets.

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