US, China talk to resolve trade differences

BEIJING: US trade representative Katherine Tai and China’s vice premier Liu He had a “candid” first conversation as the two sides try to resolve some of their differences on trade.

The trade chiefs spoke on Thursday morning in Beijing, China’s ministry of commerce said, and “conducted candid, pragmatic and constructive exchanges in an attitude of equality and mutual respect”.

In a separate statement, the USTR said, “Ambassador Tai discussed the guiding principles of the Biden-Harris administration’s worker-centred policy and her ongoing review of the US-China trade ties, while also raising issues of concern.”

The phone call is one of the few top-level meetings between the two sides since President Joe Biden took office in January and comes after top diplomats had an acrimonious meeting in Alaska in March. While both nations agreed on a partial trade deal in 2020, China and the US still have tariffs on billions of dollars in trade in place, and China has never met the purchase commitments it made in that deal.

The US administration is reviewing its stance towards China and hasn’t made any major changes to the policies it inherited from former president Donald Trump, although there are increasing signs of the direction it will take. The White House’s top official for Asia said this week that the US is entering a period of intense competition with China as its government becomes ever more tightly controlled by President Xi Jinping.

“The period that was broadly described as engagement has come to an end,” Kurt Campbell, the US coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the national security council, said. US policy towards China will now operate under a “new set of strategic parameters”, Campbell said, adding that “the dominant paradigm is going to be competition.”