Trump Says No Trade Deal Unless He Meets With Xi

President Donald Trump said on Thursday he wanted a “very big deal” US trade deal with China, but signaled there could be delays if negotiations fail to meet his goals of opening the Chinese economy broadly to US industry and agriculture.

In remarks to reporters as a two-day round of high-level talks between US and Chinese negotiators wound down, Trump said he did not know whether he would push back a deadline to raise US tariffs on Chinese goods at the beginning of March.

“This isn’t going to be a small deal with China. This is either going to be a very big deal, or it’s going to be a deal that we’ll just postpone for a little while,” Trump, who has engaged in a series of fights with a variety of trade partners since becoming president in 2017, said at the White House.

As delegations from the world’s two top economies held the second of two scheduled days of talks in the US capital aimed at easing a six-month-old trade war, Trump said no final accord will be made until he meets with President Xi Jinping in the near future.

US negotiators have sought to resolve deep differences over China’s intellectual property practices. Trump has threatened to raise tariffs on US$200 billion of Chinese goods to 25 percent from 10 percent on March 2 if an agreement is not reached and impose new tariffs on the rest of Chinese goods shipped to the United States.

Asked if he would postpone the US-set deadline, Trump said: “I don’t know.”

Trump said China wanted to strike a deal by March 1 to avoid the tariff increase and said he thinks he can get one, but it may not be totally fleshed out in writing by then.

“I’d like to accommodate China if we can get the deal done,” Trump said.

An official with the US Chamber of Commerce business group said after being briefed on the talks that significant differences remained between the two sides, with no new Chinese proposals to address core US demands that Beijing end forced transfers of US technology to Chinese firms, heavy state industrial subsidies and discriminatory digital trade laws.

“Our sense from our discussions last week in China is that China is struggling to come up with anything on the technology transfer side, and from our standpoint that’s problematic,” Myron Brilliant, the chamber’s head of international affairs, said.

Brilliant added that there was some progress in narrowing differences over enforcement of intellectual property rights such as copyright and piracy criminalization issues.

The leader of the Chinese delegation, Vice Premier Liu He, is expected to extend an offer for Trump to meet with Xi in China. (Reuters)