Washington sources reported that US President donald trump said on tuesday that Phase 1 of an American trade deal with china would be signed on Jan. 15 at the White House. Meanwhile the president wrote in a tweet that he would sign the deal with "high level representatives of China" and that he would later travel to Beijing to begin talks on the next phase.
Furthermore in exchange, the U.S. canceled new tariffs on roughly $156 billion in Chinese imports that were set to take effect Dec. 15. The trump administration also agreed to slash the tariff rate in half on about $120 billion of Chinese goods on which it had imposed a 15% tariff on Sept. 1. Further the U.S. has sketched out a phase one deal that includes at least five main areas: purchases, intellectual property protection, financial sector liberalization, enforcement and foreign exchange policy.
white house trade adviser Peter Navarro said on Tuesday. “We’ve got a base obligation in forced technology transfer". Moreover the deal is as significant for what it doesn’t cover. Those areas include Beijing's subsidies to Chinese industry, in particular to state-owned enterprises, and many tactics the U.S. claims Beijing uses to wrangle technology from American companies or forces them to hand over to do business in China. “It will be a very hard slog to reach an agreement on the fundamental issues that separate the two sides.” Apparently Chinese President Xi jinping faces an increasingly tricky balancing act, say china experts. He wants to stabilize a wobbly bilateral relationship while not appearing to his domestic audience to give in to U.S. demands.
