King Don says hos meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping was “amazing“. The only thing amazing about Thursday’s meeting is that anyone would characterize a retreat to the status quo ante September as a “roaring success”.
The United States and China are rolling back some but not all of this year’s tariffs. China has put off further clamping down on rare-earth exports for a year, but China appears to be keeping in place restrictions on rare-earth sales it imposed to retaliate against Trump’s initial tariff attack in April.
China said it will start buying soybeans from the U.S. again, but the amounts U.S. leaders are quoting—12 million tons to from this year’s harvest, 25 million tons each year for the next three years, numbers not confirmed by China—are lower than China’s previous bean buys:
And remember that when King Don signed the “momentous… historic… incredible” Phase One trade deal with China in 2020 on China’s promise to buy $200 million more in U.S. goods and services over two years, China never followed through. Yesterday King Don and President Xi didn’t even sign anything to firm up this new “deal” to merely de-escalate the current trade war.
The U.S. does not appear to have forced China to do anything new to benefit the U.S. that China wasn’t doing before King Don launched this trade war. China’s retaliatory measures appear to have pushed the U.S. to back off some of the destabilizing and self-destructive trade moves it has made this year. China thus emerges from this vague truce looking like the stronger economic power.