Progress has apparently been made in the trade war between the United States and China. After several rounds of negotiations, U.S. President Donald Trump is reportedly ready to postpone his deadline for the imposition of higher tariffs on Chinese goods. That is a promising sign because U.S. action would prompt a tit-for-tat rejoinder by Beijing. While Chinese behavior needs to change, unilateral action by Washington is not the way to achieve that objective. A multilateral approach that uses the rule of law rather than presidential pique is the only way to obtain significant and enduring results.
Trump believes that China is an unfair trader, exploiting the open U.S. market, stealing intellectual property and forcing the transfer of technology to help Chinese businesses and gain an advantage in the economic competition between the two countries. He has demanded that China reduce and eventually eliminate its $300 billion trade surplus with the U.S., and adopt structural reforms that end the benefits Beijing confers on domestic industry. To bring about that change, he has imposed a 10 percent tariff on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports. That number was set to jump to 25 percent, but Trump pledged in December to suspend the increase for 90 days to allow the two governments to negotiate a settlement. This week, he said he was prepared to delay that March 1 deadline if there was progress in the talks. Reports that the Chinese economy is growing at the slowest pace in three decades could encourage Trump to wait and let pressures mount on the Chinese leadership.
Pushing back the deadline was similarly intended to prod Chinese negotiators to be more accommodating when they met their U.S. counterparts, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in Beijing this week. A final deal will depend on Trump and Xi meeting to hammer out details and to ensure that the U.S. president gets credit for any agreement.