By Ana Swanson
President Trump stopped short of announcing a final trade deal with China on Thursday, saying in an Oval Office meeting with the Chinese delegation that it may take another four weeks or more to secure an “epic” trade agreement.
Negotiators had originally aimed to secure a deal this week during a visit from Liu He, the Chinese vice premier and special trade envoy, and announce a presidential summit meeting between Mr. Trump and Xi Jinping of China. But after more than a year of tit-for-tat tariffs, on-and-off negotiations and threats of additional punishment, the United States and China continue to haggle over some remaining issues, including how many of the American tariffs on Chinese goods will be removed, and when.
“We’re talking intellectual property protection and theft. We’re talking about certain tariffs,” Mr. Trump said, referring to issues that remain unresolved.
People familiar with the negotiations had said that the president was poised to announce a summit meeting with China. But those plans spurred a backlash among some of the president’s trade advisers, who argued that announcing a meeting before the deal was struck would weaken the United States’ hand and give it less leverage to force changes it is seeking.
In remarks at the White House, Mr. Trump said that the deal was “very complete” and that the two sides had “agreed to far more than we have left to agree to.”
“I think I can say some of the toughest things have been agreed to,” he continued.
But he said there would be no summit meeting until a final deal was made. “If we have a deal then we’ll have a summit,” the president said.
The date and location of a summit meeting have also proved controversial. The United States had initially proposed holding one at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida resort, but China has been pushing for an official state visit in Washington or a neutral location in a third country, people familiar with the matter said.
Lawmakers had publicly fretted about announcing a summit meeting before the deal was inked, suggesting that Mr. Trump was surrendering his leverage in his eagerness to sign an agreement.
Both Republicans and Democrats have urged Mr. Trump to hold out for a tough deal to combat Chinese practices that American businesses have long seen as problematic, including the coerced transfer of foreign technology as a condition of doing business in the country and the ample government subsidies for Chinese firms.
“Last week @POTUS told us he would not sign a ‘good’ trade deal with #China he would only sign a ‘great’ one,” Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said in a Twitter post on Thursday morning. “I believe him. But to be a ‘great’ deal it must allow us to do in China what they can do in US & it must have real enforcement mechanisms.”
The United States has pressed China to make commitments on purchasing American goods, opening markets to foreign business and increasing protections for foreign intellectual property in a bid to rebalance an economic relationship that Mr. Trump says is unfair for American workers. It remains to be seen how sweeping and significant any agreement will be, and whether it will achieve the lofty promises Mr. Trump has made about resetting the economic relationship with Beijing.
But the White House is also facing pressure to resolve the trade war, which has begun to hurt American farming, manufacturing and other sectors, and caused wild swings on Wall Street. Industries including automaking, technology manufacturing and farming have anxiously awaited reduced tariffs and details of a new agreement, which will have huge implications for their businesses.
The president’s tariffs have been successful at bringing the Chinese to the negotiating table, and his advisers have insisted they will not squander an opportunity to press China for substantial economic reforms that past administrations were unable to secure. Still, the Chinese have balked at making any reforms that could be viewed as infringing on their sovereignty or undercutting the Communist Party’s control of the economy.
“If you and I are making a deal, and you have to drag me kicking and screaming the whole way, what are the odds the deal is going to hold?” asked Derek Scissors, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “I don’t find that the slightest bit convincing.”
American negotiators have pushed for an enforcement mechanism that would allow tariffs on Chinese goods to snap back if China violated the terms of the deal, and that would forbid China to retaliate. But Chinese negotiators have resisted such an idea, describing it as a potential infringement on their sovereignty.
Myron Brilliant, the executive vice president and head of international affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said foreign stakeholders would be scrutinizing the deal to see whether it contained a strong enforcement mechanism that would hold the Chinese accountable to their obligations.
Catch up and prep for the week ahead with this newsletter of the most important business insights, delivered Sundays.
“That is what would separate this agreement from previous agreements,” he said.
The two sides spent the past two months drawing up more than 120 pages of an agreement covering issues including forced technology transfer and cybertheft, intellectual property rights, currency and nontariff barriers to trade. The Trump administration has also pressed China to commit to hundreds of billions in purchases of American products, including agricultural products, energy and airplanes.
The administration has been eager to front-load China’s purchases of American products to help bolster farm country and other important constituencies and try to bring down the bilateral trade deficit before the 2020 election. Mr. Trump’s advisers would prefer to keep the tariffs in place as long as possible, an arrangement the Chinese oppose.
In recent weeks, Beijing has introduced a steady drumbeat of other reforms intended to please American constituencies and win Mr. Trump’s favor. China has resumed purchases of American soybeans and announced it would reclassify fentanyl, which has fueled the American opioid epidemic, as a controlled substance. Beijing also approved a sweeping rewrite of a foreign investment law that may help foreign companies avoid unequal treatment. And it approved a request by JPMorgan Chase to establish a majority owned and controlled securities brokerage firm in the country and floated the idea of expanding access for foreign cloud computing companies.
China experts have cautioned that the long-running economic stresses between the countries are unlikely to be entirely put to rest with this round of negotiations.
“The negotiations, no matter what anybody says, will not end at the end of this phase,” said David Lampton, a fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “We’ve got decades of painful negotiating with China ahead.”
No comments:
Post a Comment