U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He have resumed talks on trade, and a potential Washington visit by Liu is being considered before the nations’ top leaders meet later this month.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, US Trade Rep Robert Lighthizer
The two officials spoke by phone on Friday, according to people briefed on the matter, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the topic. The conversation didn’t yield any concrete results, the people said. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported Tuesday that Liu was “expected” to visit Washington shortly. The Wall Street Journal first reported the phone call Monday.
The phone discussion followed a call between President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping two weeks ago—the first publicly disclosed call in six months. The two leaders are slated to meet at the Group of 20 nations summit in Argentina, which is scheduled to take place from Nov. 30 to Dec. 1.
Asian stocks came off their lows after the report Tuesday, and the Australian and New Zealand dollars climbed. China’s yuan was poised to advance for the first time in five days.
U.S.-China talks have made little progress since May, when Trump put a stop to a deal that would have seen China buy more energy and agricultural goods to narrow the trade deficit. In Beijing, Trump’s move was seen as an insult to Xi, who sent Liu—his top economic policy official—to Washington for the negotiations, and cemented a view that Trump’s real goal was to thwart China’s rise.
“We are willing to negotiate with the U.S.,” Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said at an event Tuesday in Singapore, adding that the talks should be carried out on the basis of mutual respect, balance and good faith. He said he was confident China and the U.S. have the wisdom to “be able to find a solution that is acceptable to both sides.”
While Li acknowledged that China and the U.S. had disputes in areas other than trade, he said those disagreements could also be contained with dialogue. “As long as we respect each other’s core interests and major concerns, we will be able to contain and resolve the disputes,” Li said.
China’s Foreign Ministry didn’t immediately respond to a faxed request for comment on the call.
The two nations have levied several rounds of tariffs on each other’s goods, and tariffs on $200 billion Chinese imports are due to rise to 25 percent from January in the absence of a breakthrough in negotiations.
In a speech to a Washington think-tank on Friday, Peter Navarro—a White House trade adviser who is one of the most outspoken China hawks in the administration—warned “Wall Street” bankers not to get involved in shuttle diplomacy with Beijing. In a thinly-veiled broadside at Mnuchin and other advocates of a negotiated solution he also said no one but Trump or Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, should be negotiating with Beijing.
The Trump administration has said that it wanted a substantive response to a long list of demands for what it calls “structural” changes in Chinese industrial policy. Trump has rejected a number of deals negotiated by aides such as Mnuchin and U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross that were focused on increasing purchases rather than substantive reforms.
