China, U.S. halt weekend trade talk

Crop buys falling short of promise

The U.S. and China are postponing talks planned for over the weekend that had been aimed at reviewing progress at the sixmonth mark of their phaseone trade agreement, people familiar with the matter said.

Chinese Vice Premier Liu He was supposed to hold a videoconference call with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin but it’s been rescheduled indefinitely, according to the people. The trade representative’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The talks never made it on to any official public calendar in Washington or Beijing, but the South China Morning Post reported earlier Friday that they were set for today. Earlier, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said that information on highlevel talks will be released “in due course.”

President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, on Thursday said the trade deal is going well, repeating comments he’d made earlier in the week and saying that the principals have a phone call coming up to review the deal, dismissing

concerns that rising tensions between the two countries might jeopardize the pact.

The postponement was reported earlier by Reuters, which blamed scheduling issues.

Meanwhile, the head of the U.S.’ busiest port said China is on track to buy less than one-third of the American agricultural products it promised to purchase in 2020, the first year of a trade pact between the world’s two biggest economies.

“The phase-one trade deal set lofty expectations for purchases that had not been witnessed by American agriculture producers ever — what we’ve seen so far is a requirement to buy $36 billion worth of goods, and we may edge our way towards $10 billion,” Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, said on a webcast Thursday. “We’ve got so much to catch up on in the back half of this year.”

The Asian nation has recently accelerated purchases of U.S. corn and soybeans, but the transactions may be insufficient to help it reach the target to buy $36.5 billion of agricultural goods this year, 52% more than in 2017, as it pledged in the Jan. 15 agreement.

Trump has indicated that he and Lighthizer are pleased with China’s recent purchases.

“They are giving the Midwest, our farmers, among the largest orders they’ve ever seen,” Trump said during a news briefing this week. “Somebody told me today — Bob Lighthizer said about 40% of what they’re selling now is going to China. So maybe they’re trying to make me change my mind a little bit, because you know my attitude on China, and it’s not — it hasn’t been very good.”

Zhao, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, reiterated at a regular briefing in Beijing on Friday that China is meeting its obligations but urged the U.S. to respect Chinese companies. Washington has recently cracked down on businesses including TikTok and WeChat.

“It takes two to cooperate and overcome the difficulties,” Zhao said. “We hope the U.S. can stop its restrictions and discriminatory measures on Chinese companies to create conditions for the implementation of the phase one trade deal.”

Sitting at the confluence of the dispute is the Port of Los Angeles, a key gateway for U.S.-Asia trade that has seen tariffs throw buying patterns off kilter, followed by the pandemic’s disruption of seasonal flows of supply and demand.

Data released Thursday showed that while the number of outbound containers rose 15% in July from June, they’re down 22% from a year earlier and have declined in all but one of the past 22 months on an annual basis.

Imports also improved month on month as businesses restocked warehouses to replenish lean inventories, but fell 4.3% from 2019.

Total volumes have declined for 11 straight months and dropped 6% in July from a year earlier. Through the first seven months of the year, overall volumes are down 15% compared with the same period in 2019.

“We need an all-out American effort to drive exports,” Seroka said. “We have a natural imbalance of imports versus exports only exacerbated now by these trade policies.”

The decline in the export business “puts rail cars out of balance, engine power, crew — our trucks are hauling one-way freight.”