China calls it a step, not a deal

Cautious tone reflects Beijing’s wariness of Trump’s reliability.

BEIJING — One word has been suspiciously absent from China’s media coverage of the trade talks with the United States over the past few days: deal. There has been a “result,” there has been “progress,” but there has been no “deal.”

Beijing’s version of recent events stands in contrast to the way President Donald Trump has described them. An agreement Friday was “the greatest and biggest deal ever,” the president said after negotiators struck a truce in which the United States would call off planned tariff increases in return for China buying $50 billion in U.S. agricultural products.

But none of this triumphalism was to be found in Beijing.

“This outcome is in line with the expectations of all parties,” Xinhua, the official news agency, said in a tempered commentary published Monday. “It took a step in the direction of resolving China-U.S. economic and trade issues, serves the interests of the Chinese and American people and is generally welcomed by the international community.”

The commentary made clear that there is still much work to be done.

“At the same time, it should be noted that solving the structural problems in bilateral economic and trade relations over the years cannot be achieved overnight, and we still need to make unremitting efforts,” it continued.

In Washington on Monday, White House officials remained insistent that “Phase One” of the trade deal, as Trump has referred to it, would lead to major results in just a few weeks.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, speaking on CNBC, said the progress made last week was “quite substantial.”

“We made substantial progress last week in the negotiations,” Mnuchin said. “We have a fundamental agreement. It is subject to documentation, and there’s a lot of work to be done on that front.”

He said the two countries had reached an agreement related to intellectual property rights, financial services, currency rules and “structural issues in agriculture.” But the White House did not release a single fact sheet about any of those issues or how things would be changed. Mnuchin said the White House hopes that a formal agreement can be codified during a meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Chile next month.

The cautious tone from China, echoed in other official channels, reflected Beijing’s wariness of Trump’s willingness to stick to any agreement.

“The Chinese don’t trust the Americans to honor this minideal,” analysts at Trivium/China, an economics consultancy, wrote in a note Monday night. “So they

don’t want to tout its importance just to have it blow up in their face.”

But the impetus for Beijing to continue with trade talks was underlined Monday by official statistics showing the pressures on its external sector.

China’s exports fell by 1.4% in September compared with last year, while imports were down 5.8%, according to data from the General Administration of Customs.

Both were driven overwhelmingly by a sharp slump in trade with the United States.

Over the course of this year, Chinese imports of American goods have decreased by 26.4%, while exports to the United States are down 10.7 %.

Li Kuiwen, a spokesman for the customs department, said the external environment is “complicated and severe” and that instability and uncertainty are increasing.

However, he tried to play down the effect of the trade dispute on China’s economy. While frictions with the United States “have caused considerable pressure on China’s foreign trade,” Li told reporters in Beijing on Monday, China’s overall trade volume in the first three quarters of this year continued to grow.

“The world remains highly optimistic about China’s market potential,” he said.