The White House’s stance on China was thrown into confusion on Monday night after White House National Trade Council Director Peter Navarro announced that a trade deal between the two countries was “over,” only to be quickly contradicted by US President Donald Trump.
Navarro told Fox News that the “turning point” came when the US learned about COVID-19 only after a Chinese delegation had left Washington following the signing of a “phase one” deal on Jan. 15.
“It was at a time when they had already sent hundreds of thousands of people to this country to spread that virus, and it was just minutes after wheels up when that plane took off that we began to hear about this pandemic,” said Navarro, one of the most outspoken critics of China among Trump’s senior advisers.
Photo: Bloomberg
“It’s over,” he said.
However, shortly after, the US president tweeted: “The China trade deal is fully intact. Hopefully they will continue to live up to the terms of the agreement!”
Navarro then said his comments had been taken out of context.
“They had nothing at all to do with the phase one trade deal, which continues in place,” he said, and instead referred to “the lack of trust we now have in the Chinese Communist Party [CCP].”
Navarro’s initial comments caused momentary panic on the markets, with contracts on the S&P 500 index falling as much as 1.6 percent, according to Bloomberg, and the offshore yuan weakening.
Trump has placed great store by the China trade negotiations, saying in an interview published on Sunday that he held off on imposing tougher sanctions over China’s treatment of its Uighur Muslim minority because of concern that such measures would have interfered with trade negotiations.
“Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal. And I made a great deal, US$250 billion potentially worth of purchases,” Trump told Axios when asked why he had not enacted sanctions by the US Department of the Treasury against the CCP.
Navarro’s comments came the same day the US tightened rules on four more Chinese state media organizations, denouncing them as propaganda outlets.
The US Department of State said it was reclassifying China Central Television, the China News Service, the People’s Daily and the Global Times as foreign missions rather than media outlets in the US, adding to five others designated in February.
All nine outlets “are effectively controlled by the government of the People’s Republic of China,” department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said.
“These four entities are not media outlets; they are propaganda outlets,” US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell told reporters.
On Thursday last week, Trump renewed his threat to cut ties with China, a day after his top diplomats held talks with Beijing and his trade representative said that he did not consider decoupling the US and Chinese economies a viable option.
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