Trump to meet trade advisers on tariffs

WASHINGTON/BEIJING: US President Donald Trump will meet with his top trade advisers to decide whether to activate threatened tariffs on Chinese goods, a senior Trump administration official said, as China again urged talks to settle the dispute.

Trump is due to unveil revisions to his initial tariff list targeting $50 billion of Chinese goods on Friday. People familiar with the revisions said that the list will be slightly smaller than the original, with some goods deleted and others added, particularly in the technology sector.

Another administration official said that a draft document showed that the new list would still be close to $50 billion, with about 1,300 product categories, but both the dollar amount and quantity of products were still subject to change.

It remains unclear when Trump would activate the tariffs if he decides to do so. Several industry lobbyists said that they expect the move to come as early as Friday, with publication of a Federal Register notice, or it could be put off until next week.

If Washington implements tariffs, Beijing is expected to hit back with its own duties on US imports including soybeans, cars, chemicals and planes, according to a list it released in early April.

Under the 1974 trade law that Trump invoked to pursue a tariff investigation into China’s intellectual property practices, he could delay the activation by 30 days. He can also delay the tariffs by another 180 days if the US Trade Representative’s office finds that negotiations with China are yielding progress.

“The president’s trade team has recommended tariffs. If there are not tariffs, it will be because the president has decided that he’s not ready to implement tariffs,” a person familiar with the administration’s deliberations said.

But that recommendation came prior to Trump’s trip late last week to Canada for the G7 leaders summit and to Singapore for talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to defuse a nuclear standoff on the Korean peninsula. In an interview, Trump told Fox News that he was “very strongly clamping down on trade” with China.