Donald Trump’s trade war is ‘holding gun to the head’ of US economy, US-China experts say

Panel of US-China experts in Washington have said US President Donald Trump’s trade war has failed to fundamentally change China’s behaviour

Melanie Hart, from the Centre for American Progress, said that Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule is contributing to China’s economic slowdown

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US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. Photo: AFP

Published: 6:45pm, 19 Nov 2019Updated: 7:10pm, 19 Nov 2019

US President Donald Trump’s trade policy towards China is “holding a gun to the head” of the American economy, according to a panel of experts in Washington.

The US-China trade war is now in its 17th month, but Trump’s anxiety to make a “phase one deal” after previously saying that he would accept nothing short of a grand deal, shows the policy has failed, said speakers at the National Committee on US-China Relations’ China Town Hall on Monday night, United States time.

Ely Ratner, who was deputy national security adviser to former vice-president Joe Biden, said this was “a paltry deal that achieves almost nothing”, and marked “the end of a stage of US economic policy that has basically failed and that needs to be transitioned away from”.

Melanie Hart, director of China Policy at the Centre for American Progress, said the deal was “just undoing the damage that has been done” by US tariffs on China and the subsequent retaliation from Beijing, which has hit the American agricultural economy.

“The stories that I’m hearing from family farms are absolutely atrocious and unacceptable. The costs are real and those costs have become unbearable. And to address that, I am quite sure that the Trump administration will get whatever it needs to do to get some kind of deal to say there’s a deal and to reduce some of the real costs that are being borne by American families,” Hart said.

At the outset of the now prolonged negotiations between the US and China, many had hoped that Trump’s tariffs would force China to adopt structural change to its economy, including eliminating state subsidies – or at least making the process more transparent – and ending forced technology transfer and intellectual property theft.

Few of these structural issues are set to be addressed in a phase one deal, which has instead left negotiators haggling over the level of agricultural purchases China should commit to.