It has been 10 days since
President Trump
and
President X
i held their now famous meeting in Osaka, on the margins of this year’s G-20 summit. Still the general trade conversation keeps circling back to it, and we expect USTR
Robert Lighthizer
and Chinese Vice Premier
Liu He
will do the same in their conversation later this week.
The element we find ourselves returning to again and again is the transcript from President Trump’s press conference on the afternoon of June 29. It was long and rich. At the beginning there is the president’s paean to Osaka – “It’s big. It’s beautiful. It’s clean. … The job they do with industrial manufacturing and lots of other things is really incredible.” He goes on to talk about women’s empowerment, the Mexican border, Turkey’s frustration with trying to buy Patriot missiles from the U.S., and, of course, trade: NAFTA, USMCA, the WTO, all of it.
Our focus today is on U.S.-China trade and the understanding reached earlier that day between President Trump and President Xi. Here is more of the from excerpt with today’s featured quote.
PRESIDENT TRUMP
And we had a great meeting, and we will be continuing to negotiate. And I promised that, for at least the time being, we’re not going to be lifting the tariffs on China. We won’t be adding an additional tremendous amount of — we have, I guess, $350 billion left, which could be taxed or could be tariffed. And we’re not doing that. We’re going to work with China on where we left off, to see if we can make a deal.
… And China is going to be buying a tremendous amount of food and agricultural product, and they’re going to start that very soon, almost immediately. We’re going to give them lists of things that we’d like them to buy.
[The other piece of the U.S.-China puzzle President Trump focused on was Huawei. He opened that topic saying:]
We mentioned Huawei. I said, “We’ll have to save that until the very end. We’ll have to see.”
One of the things I will allow, however, is — a lot of people are surprised — we send and we sell to Huawei a tremendous amount of product that goes into the various things that they make. And I said that’s okay, that we will keep selling that product.
To state the obvious, important as these topics are, they are but a tiny subset of the issues in dispute between the United States and China. What all of the issues have in common, however, is that the assessments of where things stand are constantly changing. Take, for example, the President’s expectation that China will resume its large purchases of U.S. agricultural products. China reportedly bought some 544,000 metric tons of U.S. soybeans right at the start of the Osaka summit, but as
Politico’s Morning Trade
reported this morning, there has been virtually nothing since.
The Huawei issue is a little different. We don’t expect China to put out press releases about its purchases of U.S. semiconductors, but neither would we discount the importance of such sales.
John Neuffer
, the president and CEO of the Semiconductor Industry Association, put that relationship in perspective when he explained that Huawei:
As a company, it’s the number one telecom equipment provider. It’s the number two cell phone maker in the world. And it is the number three purchaser of semiconductors, after Apple and Samsung.