Did Trump back-pedal on plan to hit China with trade sanctions?
US reportedly planned to impose measures against Beijing over its lack of help with North Korea crisis and tensions over intellectual property violations
US President Donald Trump may have backed away from a plan to announce trade measures aimed at forcing China to give US companies easier access to its markets.
US media, including The Wall Street Journal and Politico, said earlier this week that Trump’s aides were drawing up trade sanctions against Beijing. The Trump administration was responding, according to the reports, to a lack of cooperation from Beijing in halting North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme and tensions over intellectual property violations and market access for US companies in China.
With no China announcements from the White House by the end of the week and Trump preparing for a 17-day vacation, reports from Washington said the sanctions plan was on ice, at least temporarily. Citing unnamed sources, Politico said the trade action had been “postponed” without a new date. CNBC said the US agriculture lobby pressured US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to hold back as soybeans are one of the US’s biggest exports to China. Moreover, China agreed last month to open its markets to American rice for the first time.
“The decision to impose tougher trade restrictions and other economic measures as a retaliatory action on an important global player like China deserves careful, deliberate thought and planning, so I see hitting the pause button as a good thing,” said Andrew Karolyi, a finance professor at Cornell University and author of Cracking the Emerging Markets Enigma.
Among other reasons Trump might want to hold back is that China’s improving trade and investment relations with the EU creates the risk that Beijing would have more alternatives than the US in a prolonged sanctions war.
