US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he does not expect much progress from trade talks with China this week in Washington.
Trump said in an interview that he had “no time frame” for ending the trade dispute with China, which threatens to impose tariffs on virtually all goods traded between the world’s two largest economies.
“I’m like them; I have a long horizon,” he added.
The talks this week come as new US tariffs on US$16 billion of Chinese goods take effect tomorrow, along with retaliatory tariffs from Beijing on an equal amount of US goods. The US Trade Representative’s Office also is holding hearings this week on proposals for tariffs on a further US$200 billion of Chinese goods that would start to directly hit consumer products.
Chinese negotiators would be arriving shortly, Trump said, adding that he did not “anticipate much” from the mid-level discussions.
He said resolving the trade dispute with China will “take time because China’s done too well for too long, and they’ve become spoiled. They dealt with people that, frankly, didn’t know what they were doing, to allow us to get into this position.”
The meetings, expected to take place today and tomorrow in Washington, are the first formal US-China trade talks since June, when US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross met Chinese Vice Premier Liu He (劉鶴) in Beijing, but returned with no agreements.
Since then, Washington and Beijing have been locked in escalating rounds of tit-for-tat tariffs, with tariffs on US$50 billion in goods by each country expected to be in place by tomorrow.
Trump has threatened to impose duties on virtually all of the more than US$500 billion of Chinese goods exported to the US.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Lu Kang (陸慷), asked about Trump’s comments at a regular news briefing in Beijing, reiterated that China hoped the talks could reach a “good result.”
“We hope that both sides can sit down quietly and steadily, and dedicate themselves to getting a good result on the basis of equality, parity and trust,” Lu said.
Trump’s tariffs are part of his administration’s effort to pressure China into making major changes to its economic policies to better protect intellectual property, end its industrial subsidy efforts and open its markets to foreign competition.
Beijing denies US allegations that it systematically forces the unfair transfer of US technology and insists that it adheres to WTO rules.
The Washington talks are to be led by US Undersecretary of the Treasury David Malpass and Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen (王受文).
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