China offered to boost its annual purchases of U.S. products by “at least $200 billion” Friday as two days of talks aimed at averting an open breach between the two countries ended in Washington, a top White House adviser said.
“They have to lower their tariff rates, they have to lower their non-tariff barriers. We have to have a verifiable process whereby the technology transfers and the theft of intellectual property stops,” he told reporters at the White House.
Kudlow spoke shortly before the talks between a U.S. delegation led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and a Chinese team headed by Vice Premier Liu He, one of President Xi Jinping’s closest advisers, ended for the day.
“China’s come to trade. They are meeting many of our demands,” said Kudlow, who called the Chinese approach “constructive.”
There was no immediate comment from the White House as of 11 p.m. Friday, several hours after the talks concluded.
China’s state-run media said the discussions were “positive, constructive and fruitful.”
Still, the bargaining poses a challenge for President Trump, who has made rebalancing U.S. trade relationships and recapturing lost manufacturing jobs a centerpiece of his agenda.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer has pressed the president to seek a comprehensive reshaping of Chinese trade practices, such as forcing foreign companies operating in China to surrender their technological secrets. That argues for a broader deal that would do more than shrink the bilateral trade gap, which most economists regard as unimportant.
But Trump is mindful of the need for a political win to trumpet in the run-up to the November congressional elections, especially with his promised renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement languishing. He also can ill afford a split with China as he prepares to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at next month’s summit in Singapore.
Kudlow’s upbeat assessment came one day after Trump said that the United States had been “ripped off” by China.
The two sides had swapped hard-line demands during a first round of talks in Beijing this month. The president is insisting on a dramatic reduction in the U.S. trade deficit with China, which was $375 billion in 2017 and has topped $100 billion for 16 straight years.
Stepped-up Chinese purchases will focus on U.S. agricultural goods, energy products such as liquefied natural gas and machinery, a senior administration official said.
Still, many economists say that it is difficult to imagine that China — which bought just $130 billion worth of U.S. goods last year — could add an additional $200 billion in purchases to that total.
China also repeated its long-standing demand that the United States relax its export controls on items such as supercomputers, riot control equipment, police surveillance systems, helicopters, missiles and various munitions. The United States has prohibited sales of many of those items to China for almost 30 years, since the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square killings.
China wants the Trump administration to lift its penalties on ZTE, a Chinese telecom company that was barred from buying parts from American companies after it shipped products to Iran and North Korea despite international economic sanctions.
Kudlow told Fox Business Network that ZTE would have to overhaul its top management to escape the draconian U.S. punishment, which threatened to put it out of business.
“We’re not talking about letting them off scot-free by any stretch,” Kudlow said.
After months of rising tensions between the two countries, Chinese officials in recent days appeared to signal an interest in de-escalating. Liu met with Trump and top aides Thursday, while in Beijing his government ended an anti-dumping investigation into imports of U.S. sorghum.
China said it had concluded that the anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures it had imposed on sorghum imports in April would affect the cost of living for Chinese consumers and were not in the public interest.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman, Lu Kang, told journalists not to “over-interpret” the announcement.
The sorghum probe had sparked concerns among American farmers that they might lose their largest export market for the crop.
China imported $956 million of sorghum from the United States last year, according to the Chinese Commerce Ministry.
Economists say it is far from clear how China could achieve a $200 billion reduction in the trade deficit with the United States — unless U.S. exporters, already running at or near full capacity, were to divert goods destined for other countries to China, a development that would only shift trade flows and not cut the global U.S. deficit.
Beijing is also asking the United States to relax export controls banning the sale of many high-tech products to China — something Washington is loath to agree to.
Separate Chinese tariffs on about $3 billion of U.S. products, including fruit, nuts and pork, were imposed in March in response to Trump’s decision to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.
Luna Lin contributed to this report.