(April 8): A top US trade official promoted the creation of a US-China board of trade, while downplaying the possibility of a similar group focused on bilateral investment, a sign of what could be at the centre of talks when Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump meet next month.
“We’re looking at that kind of mechanism where we can work with the Chinese to figure what are the non-sensitive goods we should be trading with each other, get a handle on that, figure out what those flows should look like,” US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on Tuesday during an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington.
“Then you’re in a better position to talk about stickier issues,” he added.
The creation of a board of trade was discussed in recent trade talks in Paris involving Greer, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and China’s Vice Premier He Lifeng. That March meeting was intended to set the stage for the Trump-Xi meeting this spring.
The leaders’ summit was initially scheduled for March 31-April 2, but was delayed after the start of the Iran war in late February. Trump is now planning to travel to Beijing from May 14-15.
The Paris talks also touched on the formation of a board of investment but Greer suggested that was unlikely to come to fruition, saying that right now “there tends to be discrete issues on investment,” in contrast with trade, where the issues are “very concrete”.
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“Maybe there’s a Chinese investment in the US or American investment involving Chinese companies where there might be roadblocks or things like that,” he said. “I don’t think we’re at the point in our relationship with the Chinese where we want to talk about the investment programmes either way, right?”
The US and China once had a broad mechanism for regular engagement on bilateral ties, known during the Obama administration as the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, but Trump abandoned that in his first term in office.
Investment-related issues are typically handled by the US Treasury Department.
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The May summit is expected to focus on tariff and trade issues and could also feature some announcements of business deals, including a discussed Chinese purchase of 500 jets from Boeing Co.
Separately, Greer appeared to rule out an in-person visit to Beijing before the summit, telling the South China Morning Post that preparatory talks with the Chinese side would take place virtually.
Greer said the US trade deficit in goods with China went down by US$130 billion last year, or 30%.
“We really need to get the trade deficit under control,” Greer said. “We need to make sure our national security is in a very good place vis-a-vis the Chinese,” he said.
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