[A Chinese delegation had been expected in Washington this week for talks on resolving the trade dispute, but the visit was canceled after President Trump last week announced tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, ranging from televisions to toys. That means that about half of the products that Americans buy from China now have an extra 10 percent duty added.]
By Anna Fifield
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China's
vice minister of commerce, Wang Shouwen, leaves a news conference in
Beijing
on Tuesday after saying it was impossible to hold trade talks with the
United
States while Washington is imposing tariffs.
(Greg
Baker/AFP/Getty Images)
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BEIJING
— The United States is
“holding a knife to our neck” with its attempts to force China to give in to
its demands to rectify trade imbalances, a top official here said Tuesday, a
day after the two sides imposed another round of onerous tariffs on each
others’ products.
With both Beijing and Washington holding
their ground, the dispute between the world’s two largest economies looks set
to rumble on with no obvious end in sight.
China is more than willing to resume talks
with the United States, Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen told reporters
Tuesday.
“Our door is open for the resumption of trade
consultations and negotiations, but to make the negotiations effective, they
should be based on mutual respect and treating each other as equals,” Wang
said. “But the U.S. has imposed such large trade restrictions, it is like they
are holding a knife to our neck.”
A Chinese delegation had been expected in
Washington this week for talks on resolving the trade dispute, but the visit
was canceled after President Trump last week announced tariffs on an additional
$200 billion worth of Chinese goods, ranging from televisions to toys. That
means that about half of the products that Americans buy from China now have an
extra 10 percent duty added.
Beijing responded by announcing it would
impose tariffs of 5 to 10 percent on an additional $60 billion of American
goods, from meat to liquefied natural gas. The new tariff regime took effect
Monday.
Showing China had no intention of backing
down, the state media was a chorus of defiance on Tuesday, portraying
Washington as an unreasonable bully.
“If the Trump administration continues to
stick to its unilateral and protectionist stance, and refuses to respect the
fundamental norms of mutual respect and consultation, it would be difficult for
the two sides to make substantial progress in any future trade talks,” the
China Daily said in an editorial.
China would not give in, but nor would it
retaliate infinitely, the Global Times said.
“China is a country that sticks to
principle,” the state-backed paper said in an editorial. “This makes China
strategically firm when facing pressure. Unprincipled compromise will only lead
to worse scenarios.”
Many analysts here say that Trump has left
Beijing with little room to maneuver. Announcing the latest round of tariffs,
the president warned that he would slap duties on the remaining $267 billion
worth of products that China exported to the United States if Beijing tried to
retaliate.
“It’s like saying, ‘I’m going to hit you in
the face, and if you fight back, I’m going to hit you some more,’ ” said Yu
Yongding, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “How
can they expect Chinese diplomats to go to the United States to negotiate? It’s
too much.”
Liu He, China’s point man on trade
negotiations with the United States, had been expected to travel to Washington
this week for talks with officials from the Treasury Department and Office of
the U.S. Trade Representative. However, the trip was scrapped as the war of
words and tariffs escalated.
“Trump thought he could bully China into
kowtowing to him. But that’s a very stupid strategy,” Yu said.
The latest round of sanctions has made it
less likely, not more, that China would enter into talks, said Mei Xinyu, a
researcher at a Commerce Ministry think tank in Beijing.
“Trump wants to make it look like China is
being coerced into accepting a deal, and of course China will not play along
with that,” Mei said.
To make a deal, the demands need to be
reasonable, he said. “The American side wants to force China to make a deal
under the threat of tariffs on $267 billion worth of Chinese imports. But this
idea is wrong.”
To bolster its claim to being the reasonable party
in the dispute, the Chinese government on Monday released a white paper to
“clarify” the facts on the trade friction.
But the paper, which state media uniformly
noted was 36,000 characters long, as if this somehow made it more reliable,
tried to portray China as the bastion of global economic liberalism trying to
protect itself — and the rest of the world — from a unilateralist Trump.
It sharply criticized the “protectionism” of
the “America First” policy of the U.S. administration — without singling out
Trump by name.
“Faced with a host of grave challenges to
human progress, all countries, particularly major countries, need to shoulder
the obligation and responsibility of guiding and promoting international
cooperation,” the paper concluded, urging rejection of a “Cold War mentality”
in which trade is a “zero sum game.”
The paper, filled with tables and case
studies, cited research by the U.S. China Business Council, Washington think
tanks and Goldman Sachs. It also used examples involving General Motors, Intel
and Apple to show why bilateral trade was in the best interest of the United
States.
This message was reinforced Tuesday when Fu
Ziying, China’s international trade representative, described why the trade war
was not in the United States’ interest.
“Overall, the U.S. has gained more from
trading with China, and the profits of American businesses are far larger than
those earned by Chinese ones,” Fu said at a news conference to unveil the white
paper. “Therefore, it can be said that, although China is running a trade
surplus, the surplus of interests is on the U.S. side.”
On specific objections to its trading
practices — such as the charge that China forces foreign companies to hand over
their technology, or simply steals it — as a condition for operating here, the
white paper said that such transfers are “voluntary” and were designed to
maximize the companies’ interests.
It portrayed China as diligently guarding
foreign companies’ intellectual property and upholding World Trade Organization
rules. And in another apparent dig at Trump, it appealed to “mature political
leaders in the U.S.” to “come back to their senses” and “redress misguided
behaviors” to put bilateral trade relations back on the right track.
There are now signs that the trade war is
spilling over into the military sphere, exacerbated by the sanctions that the
United States imposed on China last week for buying combat aircraft and
surface-to-air missiles from Russia
The Chinese government has denied the U.S.
Navy permission for an amphibious assault ship, the USS Wasp, to make a port
visit in Hong Kong next month, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
This followed the last-minute cancellation of
a meeting between two top naval officials that had been scheduled for Saturday.
Chinese Vice Adm. Shen Jinlong had been
scheduled to attend the International Seapower Symposium at the Naval War
College in Rhode Island, where he was due to meet the American chief of naval
operations, Adm. John Richardson.
“We were informed that Vice Adm. Shen Jinlong
has been recalled to China and won’t conduct a visit with Adm. Richardson,” a
Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Dave Eastburn, said in a statement.
Officials from the Equipment Development
Department of the Chinese Central Military Commission will be denied visas to
travel to the United States and banned from the American financial system as
punishment.
This feeds into a Chinese narrative that the
Trump’s administration’s actions are not about trade but about thwarting the
country’s rise.
Trying to keep China down would be like
trying to go against the flow of history, said Fu, the Chinese trade official.
“The
so-called strategy of containing China does not represent the direction of the
development of human society,” he told reporters Tuesday. “If you look at
history, war in all its forms — whether it be a trade war or a real war — comes
with a huge price. It will be the people that will suffer in the end.”
Yang Liu contributed to this report.
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