U.S. Treasury Secretary Snowman Nussin said Wednesday that he and other U.S. officials will travel to Beijing next week for trade talks aimed at reaching an agreement to avoid U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods on March 2. In an interview with CNBC, Manuchin said that his talks with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Leacht last week in Washington with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He were "very fruitful".
"Ambassador Lighthizer and I, together with a large team, will travel to Beijing next week. "We are committed to continuing these negotiations," Manuchin said. "We are investing a lot of energy in trying to reach this deadline and reach an agreement. That is our goal. "
In his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Donald Trump said that any new trade agreement with China "must include real structural changes to end unfair trade practices, reduce long-term trade deficits and protect American jobs."
If the two sides fail to reach an agreement at 12:01 a.m. GMT on March 2, Trump has vowed to raise the value of American imports to China from 10% to 25%, to 25% (about 154 billion pounds).
The two sides are still far apart in resolving the US demand for China to carry out profound structural reforms in its trade and economic policies and narrow the US trade deficit in goods. The U.S. Department of Commerce reported Wednesday that the U.S. trade deficit with China reached $382 billion in the first 11 months of 2018, surpassing the $375 billion gap for the whole year of 2017, although the deficit narrowed in November from October.
Trump's negotiators hope Beijing will make greater efforts to enforce U.S. intellectual property rights, stop cyber attacks on trade secrets, curb industrial subsidies and end the policy of forcing U.S. companies to transfer technology to Chinese competitors as a price for doing business in China's vast market.
They said that the key part of any agreement is a mechanism to verify and implement the follow-up of China's commitments to it.
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