Beijing says ‘this rumor is not true’ but makes conciliatory signals in bid to stop tit-for-tat dispute escalating into full-scale trade war
China has rejected Trump administration claims that it had offered to cut its trade surplus with the US by $200bn, China’s foreign ministry said on Friday.
Various US news outlets, citing anonymous sources, had reported that Chinese trade officials, meeting with US counterparts in Washington this week, had acceded to Trump demands to cut its $375bn annual trade surplus, in part by increasing purchases of American goods.
“This rumor is not true. This I can confirm to you,” foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a regular news briefing.
However, the ministry spokesman said that the trade consultations led by Chinese vice-premier Liu He and US treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, commerce secretary Wilbur Ross and trade representative Robert Lighthizer were “constructive”.
Despite China’s rejection of the adminstration’s claims of a deal, which were unattributed in news reports, Beijing is striking a conciliatory pose in negotiations to prevent the current tit-for-tat dispute involving hundreds of billions of dollars in punitive tariffs from escalating into a full-scale global trade war.
China announced that it would end its anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigation into imports of sorghum and reopen its review of Qualcomm’s proposed $44bn acquisition of NXP Semiconductors NV – a deal that was put on hold as trade tensions worsened earlier this year.
Last weekend, Trump tweeted that he wanted to help Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE “get back into business, fast” after it was banned from doing business in the US over violation of North Korean and Iranian sanctions.
