China trade steps good start but US demands untouched

18 Dec 2018 2093 | Business & Trade Fairs

The United States has welcomed Chinese concessions since the two declared a trade war truce in early December, but trade experts and people familiar with negotiations say Beijing needs to do far more to meet US demands for long-term change in how China does business.

US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, agreed on Dec 1 in Buenos Aires to stop escalating tit-for-tat tariffs that have disrupted the flow of hundreds of billions of dollars of goods between the world’s two biggest economies.

Since then, Beijing has resumed buying US soybeans, the single largest agricultural export between the two countries. China has also cut tariffs on imports of cars from the United States, dialed back on an industrial development plan known as “Made in China 2025,” and told its state refiners to buy more US oil.

Mr Trump took those as signs that “China wants to make a big and very comprehensive deal.”

But they only start to bring Beijing and Washington back to their pre-trade-war status quo, experts said, and do little to resolve core US demands for structural changes in China to end policies that subsidize large state-owned enterprises and effectively force the transfer of American technology to Chinese firms.

“I think these are goodwill gestures, but they don’t go beyond offers that were on the table before Trump launched his trade war,” said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow and trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“Much more will have to be offered by China to reach an interim agreement in March 2019,” Mr Hufbauer said, adding that structural changes would be far harder to agree on, much less achieve, by then.

Mr Trump and Mr Xi agreed on Dec 1 to launch new talks while the United States delayed a planned Jan 1 tariff increase until March 2.

A spokeswoman for US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who is leading talks from the American side, did not respond to queries about the significance of China’s trade steps.