Anticipated trade deal is apparently falling apart.
On May 20, with the Trump administration talking optimistically about its chances of striking a major trade deal with China, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin declared America’s trade war with Beijing “on hold.” Now, with that deal apparently falling apart, the war is officially back on: The White House announced a new round of trade actions Tuesday intended to punish China for stealing technology and intellectual property, including a new 25 percent levy on $50 billion of Chinese goods “containing industrially significant technology.”
“The United States will continue efforts to protect domestic technology and intellectual property, stop noneconomic transfers of industrially significant technology and intellectual property to China, and enhance access to the Chinese market,” press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement. “Likewise, the United States will request that China remove all of its many trade barriers, including non-monetary trade barriers, which make it both difficult and unfair to do business there.”
The White House additionally announced it would implement stricter controls on exports to China and Chinese investment as a means of curbing Chinese access to U. S. technologies, with a complete list of the entities to be penalized promised by June 30.
Chinese trade practices have been a frequent target for Trump since his campaign days, for both legitimate and nonsensical reasons: The president has correctly decried China’s bad habit of stealing American technology and violating intellectual property rights, but he also frequently gripes about the fact that America buys more Chinese goods than China buys from America. Making things more complicated, the administration has frequently confused and conflated the two critiques in their policy decisions. When the White House has slapped new sanctions on China, as it did in March and again on Tuesday, it has justified the decision as an issue of national security. But the administration moved to suspend those tariffs last week following apparent Chinese concessions, not on national security issues, but on the trade deficit:
Two days later, Trump announced that deal was likely to fall through. And now the administration has resumed its combative stance on Chinese trade.
