Top advisers given mission of soothing China trade strife

President Donald Trump is dispatching several of his top economic advisers to China next week for high-level talks aimed at easing trade tensions, several weeks after the White House and Beijing threatened each other with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tariffs.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, will be among those on the trip, Trump said Tuesday. The president specified no distinct goals for the delegation, but he said the trip was being organized at Beijing's request. Chinese officials in recent weeks have repeatedly complained that the administration has refused to say what concessions could resolve Trump's complaints or even what U.S. official is in charge of the trade fight.

"We're having very substantive discussions on trade," Trump said at the White House without elaboration.

Rufus Yerxa, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, welcomed the announcement. "We'd be encouraged by any indication that both sides are going to move toward some meaningful negotiation," he said. "We'll be interested to see what they put on the table."

Mnuchin first disclosed plans for a possible China trip this weekend on the sidelines of the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The inclusion of Lighthizer, the president's top negotiator and a veteran of decades of trade battles, may herald a round of bare-knuckled haggling.

In March and April, Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping engaged in an escalating flurry of trade attacks, with Trump vowing to impose tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum and Xi promising to impose tariffs on U.S. agricultural products. The back-and-forth spooked financial markets and lawmakers from both parties, in part because Trump didn't appear to have a specific strategy for resolving the fight.

He has said that the $375 billion gap between what the U.S. imports from China and what the U.S. exports to China is costing Americans jobs and must be narrowed, demanding that China open up its markets to more American goods such as automobiles.

Trump has called for "reciprocal" trade policies that would effectively put a tariff of equal size against any country that imposes tariffs on U.S. exports. But Chinese officials have recently said they would enact they own version of this policy, referring to it as "retaliation" and targeting products that could cause the most political pain in the U.S. by specifically focusing on agricultural products.

The president said that his approach to China was paying dividends.

"I believe the trade will work out, but I also think that China has never treated us with more respect than they have over the last short period of time that I'm President," he said. "I have a very excellent, as you know, relationship with President Xi."

RELATED ARTICLE

http://www.arkansas…">Waiver requests show tariff fears

Business on 04/25/2018

Upcoming Events