‘Headline guy’ Donald Trump urged by former US trade negotiator to reject China’s offer to buy more American goods
- Ex-US ambassador to Singapore urges Trump to reject China’s promise to buy US goods because the offer is ‘unverifiable’
- Frank Lavin, senior trade official under president George W Bush said Trump should push for real reform with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping
An offer to import more American goods as a means of defusing the trade war with China should be rejected by US officials, said the former head of trade negotiations with the mainland, who dismissed such diplomacy as “nonsense”.
After the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping during the G20 summit in Buenos Aires last week, it was announced that China would begin buying more US goods as a means of narrowing the trade imbalance between the two economic superpowers.
Frank Lavin, who served as undersecretary of Commerce for international trade under former president George W. Bush and also held positions in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, said that “China loves these grandiose gestures”.
None of this is verifiable, it's not even clear if it ever results in anything, because there are normal market transactions that are going to take place.
While increasing exports to China may offer Trump the chance to declare a quick victory, it would not solve the underlying issues the US claims give Chinese firms an edge over their American counterparts, according to Lavin, who led US trade negotiations with China in the 2000s.
“Before trade negotiations, China always sends people on buying missions. Buying Boeing [planes] or soybeans. We always refused to have any part in that. None of this is verifiable, it's not even clear if it ever results in anything, because there are normal market transactions that are going to take place,” Lavin told the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.
This sort of chequebook diplomacy would have been rejected out of hand during his time in office, Lavin said.
“[Trump's] a headline kind of guy. We would tell the Chinese official, 'We don't care what you buy. We don't want you to buy anything. What we care about is that people have a chance to sell, that everybody has a chance. Let the markets work. Now you're buying stuff but nobody is fixing the damn problem.' We would not touch that, but [Barack] Obama went with this stuff, Trump went with it,” said Lavin.