US, China extend trade truce for 90 days
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump extended a trade truce with China for another 90 days on Monday, at least delaying once again a dangerous showdown between the world’s two biggest economies.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he signed the executive order for the extension, and that “all other elements of the Agreement will remain the same.”
The previous deadline was set to expire at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday. Had that happened the United States could have ratcheted up taxes on Chinese imports from an already high 30 percent, and Beijing could have responded by raising retaliatory levies on US exports to China.
The pause buys time for the two countries to work out some of their differences, perhaps clearing the way for a summit later this year between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, and it has been welcomed by the US companies doing business with China.
Unfinished business
Sean Stein, president of the US-China Business Council, said the extension was “critical” to give the two governments time to negotiate a trade agreement that US businesses hope would improve their market access in China and provide the certainty needed for companies to make medium- and long-term plans.
Reaching a pact with China remains unfinished business for Trump, who has already upended the global trading system by slapping double-digit tariffs on almost every country on Earth.
The European Union, Japan and other trading partners agreed to lopsided trade deals with Trump, accepting once unthinkably US high tariffs (15 percent on Japanese and EU imports, for instance) to ward off something worse.
Trump’s trade policies have turned the United States from one of the most open economies in the world into a protectionist fortress. The average US tariff has gone from around 2.5 percent at the start of the year to 18.6 percent, highest since 1933, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University.
But China tested the limits of a US trade policy built around using tariffs as a cudgel to beat concessions out of trading partners. Beijing had a cudgel of its own: cutting off or slowing access to its rare earths minerals and magnets—used in everything from electric vehicles to jet engines.
Give and take
In June, the two countries reached an agreement to ease tensions. The United States said it would pull back export restrictions on computer chip technology and ethane, a feedstock in petrochemical production. And China agreed to make it easier for US firms to get access to rare earths.
“The US has realized it does not have the upper hand,” said Claire Reade, a former assistant US trade representative for China affairs.
In May, the United States and China had averted an economic catastrophe by reducing massive tariffs they’d slapped on each other’s products, which had reached as high as 145 percent against China and 125 percent against the United States.
Those triple-digit tariffs threatened to effectively end trade between the United States and China and caused a frightening sell-off in financial markets. In a May meeting in Geneva they agreed to back off and keep talking: America’s tariffs went back down to a still-high 30 percent and China’s to 10 percent.
“By overestimating the ability of steep tariffs to induce economic concessions from China, the Trump administration has not only underscored the limits of unilateral US leverage, but also given Beijing grounds for believing that it can indefinitely enjoy the upper hand in subsequent talks with Washington by threatening to curtail rare earth exports,” said Ali Wyne, a specialist in US-China relations at the International Crisis Group. “The administration’s desire for a trade détente stems from the self-inflicted consequences of its earlier hubris.”
