Chinese officials are signaling that they are increasingly reluctant to agree to a broad trade deal pursued by US President Donald Trump ahead of negotiations this week.
In meetings with US visitors to Beijing in the past few weeks, senior Chinese officials have indicated that the range of topics they are willing to discuss has narrowed considerably, people familiar with the discussions said.
Chinese Vice Premier Liu He (劉鶴), who is to lead the Chinese contingent in high-level talks to begin on Thursday, told visiting dignitaries that he would bring an offer to Washington that would not include commitments on reforming Chinese industrial policy or Chinese government subsidies that have been the target of longstanding US complaints, one of the people said.
That offer would be in opposition to one of the Trump administration’s core demands.
The Chinese ministries of foreign affairs and commerce in Beijing did not immediately respond to faxed requests for comments.
China was drawn into a Washington furor after Trump last week called for a Chinese investigation into former US vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Trump on Friday said that there is no link between the trade negotiations and the call for an investigation, which might become part of an impeachment inquiry into Trump.
China’s leadership “are interpreting the impeachment discussion as a weakening of Trump’s position, or certainly a distraction,” said Jude Blanchette, an expert on China’s elite politics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Their calculation is that Trump needs a win” and is willing to make compromises on substance as a result, Blanchette said.
Trump has said that he would entertain only an all-encompassing deal with China.
People close to him say he remains firm in that view.
“We’ve had good moments with China. We’ve had bad moments with China. Right now, we’re in a very important stage in terms of possibly making a deal, but what we’re doing is we’re negotiating a very tough deal,” Trump told reporters on Friday. “If the deal is not going to be 100 percent for us, then we’re not going to make it.”
Hopes have always been limited that China would agree to give up its economic model in a trade deal with the US. A draft agreement reached in April before talks broke down included few substantive commitments from China to abandon the sort of industrial policies the Trump administration and others before it have complained about, people familiar with the talks said.
One reason for that is US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer’s focus on “pragmatic” demands for Chinese change, rather than calls for a wholesale abandonment of Beijing’s industrial policy that some believe should be required of Beijing.
Lighthizer declined to comment on the state of negotiations through an aide.
While he is unlikely to accept any Chinese offer that does not address industrial subsidies or policy, people close to him say he might be willing to embrace “sequencing” a deal and an “early-harvest” agreement, as long as broader talks continue.
Still, people close to the administration say that Trump’s trade chief probably needs some kind of commitment resembling a concession on subsidies and industrial policy to sell the agreement in the US.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts