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US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin are set to embark on a third round of talks after last week's critical trade talks in Washington with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He and his team .
"We are making progress, but there is still much work to be done," Mnuchin told reporters at the White House on Wednesday, confirming US plans to continue negotiations.
A US official told CNN that last week's talks went well and that the Trump government is trying to maintain the momentum as the 90 days have pbaded, even though senior officials have acknowledged that they are staying very distant on key issues.
Trump has threatened to raise existing tariffs and adopt a third set of penalties for Chinese products imported into the United States if the two sides could not negotiate a permanent truce in a trade war that had scared the markets.
The US president has hinted that he would be willing to accept a bargaining agreement that could extend negotiations beyond the self-imposed deadline at the end of the month, but the White House insisted that the 1st March would be a "difficult deadline".
It is also unclear whether the two presidents will meet soon. A US official said the two countries were working to hold a meeting between Xi and Trump at the end of February.
But Mnuchin said nothing was planned because the United States is waiting to see how much progress can be made next week.
"At the moment, the goal is that we meet this deadline, set for March 1," said Mnuchin. "There are still problems that we can not settle, I think President Trump is looking forward to meeting with President Xi to address these issues and we will determine if he has to."
The US president made it clear that he was the main negotiator in China and that no final agreement would be reached until the two men meet again.
"No final agreement will be reached until my friend President Xi and I meet in the near future to discuss and agree on more difficult and long-standing issues," Trump told Twitter last week. Adding, "China's representatives and I are trying to reach a full agreement, leaving nothing on the table."
Addressing reporters in the Oval Office, where he met with the main Chinese negotiator after two days of negotiations, Trump said the US and Chinese negotiators "considerable progress" on a number of more difficult issues, including forced technology transfers and intellectual protection. theft of property.
But Trump nevertheless indicated that he was cautiously optimistic about the possibility of concluding an agreement with China, noting that there are certain problems on which the two countries have not yet reached an agreement.
Before the third round of talks next week, Democratic senators sent a letter to Mnuchin last Friday asking him to keep up the pressure on China and not back down on key structural issues to negotiate an agreement.
"We need to have a substantive deal that represents a real victory for the US economy and not just a pretext to end the fundamental dispute between our countries over trade issues," said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest democrat in the world. The Senate Finance Committee and Senator Sherrod Brown, the largest democrat of the Senate Banking Committee, wrote:
The President is facing a cascade of self-imposed deadlines over the coming month on important agenda items, starting with the negotiations on the federal budget before the next funding deadline, February 15th.
Trump has made the restoration of relations between the United States and China a centerpiece of his presidency, the withdrawal of a multilateral trade agreement envisaged by the Obama administration and the launch of a war last year that contributed to the economic slowdown in China the United States.
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