It's good to talk, but China and the United States remain locked in a strategic struggle, observers say

A phone call between Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump may have increased the possibility of a truce in the trade war, but the strategic dispute between Beijing and Washington is far from resolved, according to a councilor of the United States. Chinese government and other observers.

In their talks on Thursday night, Xi told Trump that both sides had to submit a proposal to settle the trade war, while Trump said the two men had "a long and very good conversation" on several issues, including trade and the North. Korea. They also decided to meet on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the end of the month.

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Direct talks were the first between the two leaders to be reported since May.

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Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Lu Kang said he was optimistic about the phone call, saying he had been "extremely positive".

"The two leaders have agreed to strengthen economic exchanges," he said, without indicating, however, that they had made progress in resolving the trade dispute.

Despite Beijing's positive message, analysts have been more pragmatic about the results of the leaders' meeting, given the huge differences between the two sides over strategic and ideological issues, as well as growing hostility to regard to China in the United States.

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"The best possible outcome of the Xi-Trump meeting would be a suspension of tariffs imposed on each other, but the United States would maintain its total blockade on China's technological development," said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University. and a counselor in Beijing.

"Bilateral tensions on strategic issues such as Taiwan, the South China Sea and the arms race will continue and may intensify," he said. "I'm very careful about the outcome of their meeting."

Shi also said that he thought China had only a limited role to play on the issue of North Korea. Beijing would not risk compromising the improvement of its relations with Pyongyang and had "very few tools to work with," he said.

At the same time, Jake Parker, vice president for China operations at the US-China Business Council, said the presidents' phone call had allowed the two countries to discuss their many disputes – from trade imbalance to China's forced technology transfers – but none of them would be easy to solve.

"They may be too complex to resolve in one meeting," he said. "But the leadership summit could lay the groundwork for the procedure to follow."

Despite the promise offered by the Trump-Xi phone call, the level of tension between the two countries came just hours after its end when the US lodged a complaint against the Chinese technology company Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co and his Taiwanese partner.

Washington accuses the two companies of stealing trade secrets from US chip maker Micron Technology, but the Chinese Ministry of Commerce opposes the accusations and has asked Washington to "remedy this mistake."

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Lu Xiang, American business specialist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that Beijing was preparing for a "worse than the worst" confrontation with the United States, and added that a new escalation would fatal to an already unstable American state. stock market.

It was "hard to know what Trump expected most from China" because of a fragmented administration that had not yet found the right balance between the priorities of various interest groups, a he declared.

"Given his [Trump’s] poor record of credibility of policies over the past year, we had better not keep too much hope, "Lu said.

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