Trump administration officials will start the latest round of trade talks with China this Wednesday, the White House press office announced Monday, with a delegation of Beijing officials arriving in Washington. The talks officially kick off an effort by the administration to beat a self-imposed deadline of March 1 to get concessions from China or else further raise tariffs on its goods.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, a staunch advocate of maintaining a hard line on China, will lead the U.S. delegation. The delegation will also include Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and White House advisers Larry Kudlow and Peter Navarro. The talks will last two days.
Trump will meet personally with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He at the conclusion, Mnuchin said at a White House press conference Monday afternoon.
Mnuchin argued that the looming deadline would create the pressure necessary to forge a deal. “We do have another 30 days after this, so my expectation is that we’ll make significant progress at these meetings, but I would emphasize these are complicated issues,” he said. Mnuchin added that there had been “significant movement” already, though he declined to give specifics.
The administration said that the talks will address “achieving needed structural changes in China that affect trade between the United States and China. The two sides will also discuss China’s pledge to purchase a substantial amount of goods and services from the United States.”
Both sides are under pressure to reach a deal in order to halt the ongoing trade war. U.S. computer giant Apple announced earlier this month that it was downgrading its first quarter earnings for the year due to falling demand in China, a factor it attributed to the trade war.
President Trump has placed tariffs of 10-25 percent on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods as part of an effort to force Beijing to change its trade policies. The White House has threatened to raise those tariffs to 25 percent across the board if progress with China is not reached by the beginning of March, though it has been vague on what would constitute progress. The administration has also placed tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum ones, a policy mainly directed at China. Beijing has responded with tariffs on $120 billion of U.S. goods.
The administration defended its tariffs in a statement Monday. “In 2018 tariffs boosted Treasury receipts by $41 billion, and that figure is expected to increase to about $60 billion next year,” the White House said.
The $41 billion figure includes all tariffs and customs duties, not just the ones imposed by the current administration, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO predicted that U.S. gross domestic product will decline by about 0.1 percent by 2022 because of tariffs imposed by the U.S. and its trading partners.
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