After riding a wave of anti-trade feeling to the White House, the Trump administration is taking a more traditional approach to resolving issues with China: a formal structure of talks that makes gradual, sometimes glacial progress.
Expectations among trade experts are restrained that the first round of talks yesterday would produce results on long-standing issues with Beijing, such as the massive trade deficit or global overproduction of steel and aluminum.
While US President Donald Trump early on attacked China for unfair trade practices, his meeting with his counterpart Xi Jinping (習近平) in April at his Florida resort prompted a change of rhetoric and launching a 100-day economic cooperation plan.
That led to specific but narrow achievements, including opening the Chinese market to US beef exports, and pledges to remove barriers to US credit card transactions and other financial services, including bond underwriting, that were to be concluded prior to yesterday’s meeting.
Meanwhile, Trump followed his two predecessors in launching a mechanism for regular talks to be led by US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, along with Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang (汪洋).
It was rebranded as the US-China Comprehensive Economic Dialogue (CED), but, “it doesn’t matter what you call it,” National Foreign Trade Council vice president Jake Colvin said.
The regular “high-level economic dialogue” can be a “useful vehicle for defusing tensions and working through disputes,” he said.
Some experts are skeptical the talks, however improved by narrowing the focus compared to the broader approach of former US president Barack Obama’s administration, will prompt China to open its market further.
The Trump administration has picked the right topics, including overcapacity and high-tech issues, but “it’s not clear to me that this mechanism or any mechanism will be very effective,” said Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
The problem is the talks are “embedded within a very unclear foreign policy, a very unclear Asia policy or China policy,” he said. “So what you have are organs of the body operating with no connection to the brain.”
As a result, “the way the relationship is going right now works in China’s favor to preserve the ‘status quo,’ and takes pressure off of them” to make changes at a pace its trading partners want, Kennedy said.
As long as there are “some in the Trump administration who are willing to accept tweetable victories,” it is more likely “we will have an unproductive increase in tensions,” he said.
David Dollar and Ryan Hass of the Brookings Institution, who both advised Obama on China policy, also said their expectations for the talks were “restrained.”
The Trump administration “probably will continue the policy of the last two presidents — cajoling China to open up more, but avoiding harsh measures that would impede the economic relationship,” the pair said in a blog post on Tuesday.
That will “relieve pressure on Beijing to make near-term concessions,” they wrote.
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