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https://scmp.com/news/china/article/3031922/donald-trump-says-bad-developments-hong-kong-could-affect-trade
China

Donald Trump says ‘bad’ developments in Hong Kong could affect trade negotiations

  • US leader issues warning days ahead of high-level trade talks in Washington
  • Calls on Beijing to deal with the protests in a ‘peaceful’ and ‘humane’ manner
Donald Trump takes questions from White House reporters in Washington on Monday. Photo: AP

US President Donald Trump said on Monday that trade talks with China could be affected should anything “bad” happen in the way authorities are handling anti-government protests in Hong Kong.

Addressing reporters at the White House, Trump offered no elaboration on what would constitute something “bad”, but he called on Beijing to deal with the protests in a “peaceful” and “humane” manner.

“If anything happened bad, I think that would be a very bad thing for the [trade] negotiation[s],” said Trump. “I think politically it would be very tough, maybe for us and maybe for some others and maybe for [Chinese President Xi Jinping]”.

The US leader also denied media reports that he had promised to Xi during a telephone call earlier this year that he would remain silent on the protests in Hong Kong while trade negotiations were ongoing.

Riot police search for anti-government protesters that have blocked a road with barricades in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district on Monday. Photo: Reuters
Riot police search for anti-government protesters that have blocked a road with barricades in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district on Monday. Photo: Reuters

CNN reported last week that records of the June call were placed in a highly-classified filing system, limiting the number of White House officials able to access them.

High-level trade negotiations, led on the Chinese side by vice-premier Liu He, are set to kick off on Thursday in Washington, days before an increase in US tariffs on US$250 billion of Chinese goods goes into effect.

During Monday’s remarks, which followed the signing of a US-Japan trade deal, Trump oscillated between optimism and pessimism about the likelihood of a deal emerging from those talks.

“We think there’s a chance that we could do something very substantial,” he said in response to a question about whether he expected any new offers from China’s negotiators. Trump said Liu’s team was coming to Washington “to make a deal”.

Minutes later, however, his forecast of both sides successfully brokering a comprehensive deal this week had changed to “maybe” and then to “probably unlikely”.

Trump’s position on the Hong Kong protests – which were triggered in June this year by a now-dead proposal to amend the city’s extradition law – has also been difficult to pin down.

Trump, who had previously avoided weighing in on the unrest and called it an internal matter for China to handle alone, gave his strongest statement on the situation during the United Nations General Assembly meetings in September, when he warned that how China chose to handle the situation “will say a great deal about its role in the world in the future”.

On Monday, the US leader said that Hong Kong was “very important as a world hub”, and repeated a suggestion he first made in August for Xi to meet personally with “leaders” of the city’s pro-democracy movement, which features no prominent leadership.

Appearing to revel in the fact that protesting Hongkongers have waved US flags and brandished signs that made direct references to him, Trump applauded both the “signage” and the “spirit” of demonstrators, and suggested that diminishing crowd sizes on the city’s streets were a sign of progress.

Yet recent weeks have only seen tensions between protesters and police in Hong Kong flare, punctuated by the shootings of two young demonstrators with live police rounds and the enactment over the weekend of emergency laws banning the use of face masks in public.

On Friday, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told Bloomberg that the US supported the pro-democracy protests “very strongly”, and said that the movement “could impinge” on this week’s talks.