China-backed Hong Kong
authorities have struggled to curb anti-government protests that have continued
for four months.
U.S. President Donald Trump
said on Friday that his administration has a “very good chance” of making a
trade deal with China, and insisted there were no links between China talks and
his desire for Beijing to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe
Biden.
Trump, speaking to
reporters before departing the White House, said negotiations to end the U.S.
trade war with China were separate from any investigation into Biden, whom
Trump has accused of foreign corruption.
“One thing has nothing to
do with the other,” the Republican president said when asked whether he would
be more likely to make a deal with China if it investigated Biden. “I want to
do a trade deal with China, but only if it’s good for our country.”
Top-level U.S.-China trade
talks are scheduled to resume next Thursday and Friday, when Chinese Vice
Premier Liu He meets with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in Washington
The talks will be preceded
on Monday and Tuesday by deputy-level discussions, White House economic adviser
Larry Kudlow said earlier.
Trump has waged a two-year
effort to change China’s trade, intellectual property and industrial policy
practices, which he has long said are unfair and have cost millions of U.S.
jobs.
His administration is
seeking stronger protections of U.S. intellectual property, an end to forced
transfers of American technology to Chinese firms, curbs to industrial
subsidies and increased access to China’s largely closed domestic markets.
In a trade war that has
lasted 15 months, the United States and China have heaped hundreds of billions
of dollars in tariffs
“I view China as somebody
we’re trying to make a deal with, we have a very good chance of making a deal
with,” Trump said. Right now, we’re in a very important stage in terms of
possibly making a deal. If we make it, it will be the biggest trade deal ever
made.”
On Thursday Trump publicly
urged Beijing to investigate Biden, a Democrat, again raising concerns that he
has invited foreign interference in the U.S. presidential election.
Last week Trump released a
transcript of a call where he asked Ukraine’s president to also look into
Biden, a request that has triggered an impeachment inquiry by House of
Representatives Democrats.
Kudlow, in television
interviews, held out hope for progress in opening China’s financial services
markets to American companies in next week’s talks, adding the U.S. team was
heading into them “open-minded.”
“Everything’s on the table,
we’d love to go back to where we were in May when we were a lot closer,” Kudlow
told Bloomberg TV.
The Trump trade team hoped
to revisit a mostly agreed text from which China had backtracked in May,
causing talks to break down, he said.
The text at that time
included an agreement negotiated by Mnuchin that involved the lifting of
foreign ownership caps on financial services firms in China.
“I’m not giving you news.
I’m just saying we had some pretty good things last spring, like financial
services opening – that could be extended,” Kudlow said in a subsequent
interview on Fox Business Network. “I say ‘could’ and the president would have
to sign off on it, but don’t rule out the possibility of good news.”
Kudlow declined to make any
predictions about the talks but said there had been a “softening of the
psychology on both sides” over the past month, with the United States delaying
some tariff increases and China making some modest purchases of American farm
products.
Kudlow also said the
impeachment inquiry was unlikely to affect the trade talks with China.
“I don’t think that’s an
impact right now. I think maybe it has only the tiniest, tiniest effect, maybe
occasionally on stock market psychology,” Kudlow said.
However, he said the Trump
administration continued to monitor freedom and democracy protests, which he
said could have an impact on the talks, without specifying how.
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