President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping made progress Saturday night toward resolving the ongoing U.S.-China trade dispute.
After more than a year of conflict and new taxes on billions of cross-border trade, the two presidents came to an agreement at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that could begin de-escalating U.S.-China trade tensions through new negotiations.
According to Trump, “It’s an incredible deal. It goes down, certainly—if it happens, it goes down as one of the largest deals ever made. It’s a deal between the United States and China made by the president and the president.”
It was a pivotal meeting between the two countries’ leaders that could have gone very differently and allowed bilateral trade issues to worsen in 2019. Instead, the two sides agreed to a process that will begin to address many of the outstanding tariffs, non-tariff barriers, and importantly, intellectual property complaints the U.S. has against China.
For 90 days, starting Jan. 1., representatives from both the U.S. and China will seek changes to trade and investment practices. And while there are few details about the structure of the negotiations themselves, there are some important takeaways already.
First, the Trump administration has applied tariffs on over $250 billion worth of Chinese imports. Of those imports, $200 billion were subject to an additional tariff of 10 percent since late September, and the 10 percent was scheduled to increase to 25 percent on Jan. 1, 2019.
The president has delayed his decision to increase these tariffs to 25 percent until the end of the 90-day negotiations, pending progress on the issues at hand.
Read the full story from The Daily Signal
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