Tough trade talks with the U.S. are boosting those inside China who want economic reforms by showing that China’s status quo is undermining its ability to work with other countries, a top U.S. Chamber of Commerce official said Tuesday.
“China’s motive to keep these negotiations ongoing is to push important reforms that are badly needed … It is in their self-interest,” Myron Brilliant, the Chamber’s executive vice president for international affairs, told reporters Tuesday. “The negotiations are enabling reforms in China that are helping China.”
The trade talks, in which the U.S. has demanded far-reaching reforms and threatened major penalties if they’re not made, have given China’s reformers an example of why the country needs to change, Brilliant said. As a result, Beijing has kept negotiations up despite having had little progress with them so far.
Brillliant noted, though, that China’s main interest is getting White House to lift the existing tariffs. The Trump administration, in turn, is trying to keep those tariffs in place while also getting China to agree to allow the U.S. to impose tariffs without facing retaliation, should China not agree to the terms of any eventual deal. That has created an impasse with the current talks.
The U.S. has levied tariffs of 10-25 percent on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods and demanded that Beijing make wide-ranging changes to its export subsidies, treatment of intellectual property rights, and currency policies.
“China has been clear that they want all of the tariffs removed. The administration has been equally clear that they want to leave tariffs in place,” Brilliant said, portraying this as the main issue being debated with the talks at the moment. He added that he was nevertheless optimistic that a deal would emerge in the coming weeks.
Brilliant said he was hopeful that the U.S. would agree to lifting at least some of the tariffs against China, because otherwise it was hard to see what they could use to retaliate against China should it not live up to its part of any trade deal.
Also holding thing up is exactly how the mechanism to automatically enact tariffs would work and when, he said. “The Chinese would like ambiguity around that provision. The administration wants clarity on that provision,” Brilliant said.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin are meeting in Washington with their counterpart, China’s Vice Premier Liu He, to continue ongoing trade talks. The administration is hoping to resolve the remaining issues soon and then follow that with a one-on-one summit between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to announce the deal.
