Face-to-Face U.S.-China Trade Talks To Resume Next Week

July 25, 2019 (EIRNS)—The governments of China and the United States have announced that direct U.S.-China trade talks will resume next week for the first time since Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump met in Osaka at the end of June. (Negotiators have held two telephone discussions since then.) The U.S. negotiators, Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, will meet in Shanghai over July 30-31, with a delegation led by China’s Vice Premier Liu He and including Commerce Minister Zhong Shang. All previous rounds of these talks in China were conducted in Beijing, but the Chinese had asked that this round be moved to Shanghai.

Mnuchin told CNBC, “I would say there are a lot of issues. My expectation is this will be followed up with a meeting back in D.C. after this, and hopefully we’ll continue to progress.”

A U.S. Treasury statement said, “The discussions will cover a range of issues, including intellectual property, forced technology transfer, non-tariff barriers, agriculture, services, the trade deficit, and enforcement.”

Unofficial background briefings are said to report that China will resume buying agricultural goods from the U.S. as a goodwill gesture during this round of talks, while Washington will ease its pressure against the Chinese communications giant Huawei. There was a White House meeting with Huawei’s U.S. supplier firms earlier this week, to discuss the procedure by which they could apply for licenses to continue to sell to Huawei, subject to national-security vetting. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has said that all their applications would be processed over the next several weeks.