With US-China trade deal set to expire, insiders reveal what’s really happening behind the scenes
- Chinese sources say trade talks between Washington and Beijing occur more frequently than authorities have revealed, while neither politics nor supply-chain disruptions are determining factors behind China’s lagging purchases
- Beijing allegedly vowed before last month’s Xi-Biden summit to ‘buy whatever the US can ship over’
With the phase-one trade deal between the world’s two largest economies due to expire at year’s end, Chinese scholars say supply-side issues are an impediment to China’s ability to meet purchasing targets.
But for now, China continues to lag behind in its commitment to buy at least US$200 billion worth of additional American goods and services, relative to the 2017 level, including US$162.1 billion worth of physical goods.
China’s total purchases of US goods from January 2020 to October 2021 reached only 60 per cent of the pledged total, according to a report by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE).
In the past two years, economical consideration has always overridden politics as the major driving factor for Chinese purchases, economists from both sides said.