US-China trade pact: A Trump triumph or rehashed news?

UN General Assembly President Peter Thomson delivers his speech during the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing, China on Sunday. (REUTERS)

WASHINGTON: The new trade agreement unveiled Friday between China and the United States is yet another olive branch from the Trump White House to Beijing, but some skeptics wonder how long the cooperative tone will last.
One thing is sure: The initial measures of the 100-day action plan launched in mid-April by China and the US stand in stark contrast with the anti-Chinese rhetoric Donald Trump used on the campaign trail.
The president has significantly softened his stance, declining last month to declare China a currency manipulator — one of the most strident pledges he made as a candidate.
And, at least at first glance, the new Sino-American trade deal appears to have vindicated this softer approach that is starting to bear fruit.
“We have made...more progress in 40 days than the prior trade negotiators had in this century,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said recently on Fox News.
The two-page plan of action calls for the lifting of the 13-year embargo Beijing had kept on American beef, as well as gradually opening the Chinese market to certain US financial services.
“It is impossible to overstate how beneficial this will be for America’s cattle producers,” said Craig Uden, president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), adding that he was eager to court 1.4 billion new consumers in China.
As important as they may be, these developments are not entirely new. Plans to lift the beef embargo had already been agreed to in principle last September under former President Barack Obama.
The only truly new development was the plan to speed up direct exports of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to China, delighting some in the American hydrocarbon industry.
“It is a strong signal from both governments that there is a real interest in using LNG produced in the US in China,” Charlie Riedl, director of the Center for Liquefied Natural Gas (CLNG), told AFP.
As for the Chinese, they got the US to lift trade barriers to Chinese exports of cooked poultry, a concession that does not appear to worry US producers.
“It would serve a niche market and we do not think that it would be a problem for our domestic industry,” said Jim Sumner, director of the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council (PEEC).
According to Douglas Paal, a China expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), these achievements are the low-hanging fruit.
“It is not negative but it is not a major step,” he said. “These are the easy steps. The heavy work has not started yet.”
Indeed, the agreement does not touch on theft of intellectual property or the American manufacturing sector, which has suffered most of all from Chinese competition — and which Trump had promised to rescue on his arrival in the White House.
Imports of Chinese-manufactured goods are nevertheless blamed for the colossal US trade gap in goods with China, which stood at $347 billion in 2016. Trump has vowed to reduce it.
“For American manufacturing, there’s not a lot there although I am not terribly surprised,” said Scott Paul of the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM).
“Those issues are going to be much harder to solve.”
Paul said the Trump administration might need to get tougher, even threaten sanctions or fresh trade barriers, to win concessions from Beijing.
“The administration may need to take a more aggressive stance,” he said.
Analysts say that, despite its repeated promises on joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, China has still not honored promises to open its markets to foreign competition.
“There is a lot of skepticism about whether or not China will really follow through,” said Paal.