China’s lead negotiator puts ‘trade balance’ at top of agenda as Trump flirts with idea of ‘interim deal’
- Vice-Premier Liu He says said ‘the whole world is expecting to see progress in China-US negotiations’ in a meeting with the US-China Business Council
- Liu welcomed Donald Trump’s decision to postpone tariffs from October 1 to October 15, described by US president as ‘goodwill gesture’
China’s top trade negotiator, Vice-Premier Liu He, has named the top items on the agenda for talks in Washington next month as the US-China “trade balance, market entry and investor protection”.
Liu, the top economic aide to President Xi Jinping, made the comments in Beijing on Thursday during a meeting with Evan Greenberg, president of the US-China Business Council, a lobby group, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
“The whole world is expecting to see progress in China-US negotiations,” Liu said, according to Xinhua.
After months of harsh rhetoric, Beijing and Washington have been exchanging more positive messages this week, fanning expectations that the trade talks next week may yield an “interim deal” that involves China’s buying US farm goods and the US’s postponing, or even scaling back, some of the tariffs.
“I’d rather get the whole deal done,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “I see a lot of analysts are saying an interim deal, meaning we’ll do pieces of it, the easy ones first. But there’s no easy or hard. There’s a deal or there’s not a deal.
But for an interim deal, Trump said “it’s something we would consider, I guess”.
At a press conference in Beijing on Thursday, China’s Ministry of Commerce said that Chinese buyers have made enquiries about the prices of US agricultural products, including soybeans and pork.
The Wall Street Journal reported that China is trying to narrow the scope of its negotiations with the US to include only trade matters, leaving thornier issues of national security on a separate track.
Bloomberg reported earlier that Trump administration is considering offering a “limited” trade deal to China that involves delaying and even rolling back some US tariffs in exchange for Chinese purchases of US goods and commitment on intellectual property rights.
At the same time, CNBC quoted an unidentified “senior White House official” as saying that an interim deal with China was “absolutely not” on the table, showing the debate within the Trump administration.
