“If the U. S. rolls out trade measures including tariffs, all the agreements reached in the negotiations won’t take effect.”
In a scathing editorial warning Trump to back off on his latest tariff threat, on Sunday China said that any trade deals between the US and China, and any progress and commitments made so far in bilateral negotiations would be withdrawn if President Donald Trump follows through with this threat.
“If the U. S. rolls out trade measures including tariffs, all the agreements reached in the negotiations won’t take effect,” the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported this morning, citing a statement from the Chinese team that met with a U. S. delegation led by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, which arrived in China overnight.
Separately, China has continued to express growing frustration with the tactics deployed by the White House, and an editorial in the nationalist, state-run tabloid Global Times said that ” the U. S. can’t have its cake and eat it too,” adding that the U. S. “needs to choose between tariffs and exporting more to China.”
China’s anger is the result of Trump’s revival of the simmering trade war between the two superpowers after Trump last week unveiled a plan to slap tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese imports, casting into doubt ongoing trade discussion about how to reduce China’s $375 billion goods-trade surplus with the U. S.
As Bloomberg clarifies, the Xinhua report came out on Sunday after Ross met with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He for talks that Ross called “friendly and frank, and covered some useful topics about specific export items.” At the same time as negotiators focus on technical steps to reduce the U. S. deficit, Trump’s aggressive reversals have rattled Beijing as it raises concerns about the possibility that any agreement made could be simply torn up by the president.
“China is concerned over the U. S.’s unpredictability, especially after Trump turned an about-face on tariffs,” said Gai Xinzhe, an analyst at Bank of China’s finance institute in Beijing.
