President Trump stopped short of announcing a final trade deal with China on Thursday, saying in an Oval Office meeting with the Chinese delegation that it may take another four weeks or more to secure an “epic” trade agreement.
Negotiators had originally aimed to secure a deal this week during a visit from Liu He, the Chinese vice premier and special trade envoy, and announce a president summit between Mr. Trump and Xi Jinping of China. But after more than a year of tit for tat tariffs, on and off negotiations and threats of additional punishment, the United States and China continue to haggle over some remaining issues, including how many of the American tariffs on Chinese goods will be removed, and when.
“We’re talking intellectual property protection and theft. We’re talking about certain tariffs,” Mr. Trump said, referring to issues that remain unresolved.
People familiar with the negotiations had said that the president was poised to announce a summit with China Thursday afternoon. But in remarks in the White House the president said that no date for a meeting with Mr. Xi had been set. “If we have a deal then we’ll have a summit,” the president said.
He added that the deal was “very complete” saying “we’ve agreed to far more than we have left to agree to. I think I can say some of the toughest things have been agreed to.”
The United States has pressed China to make commitments on purchasing American goods, opening markets to foreign business and increasing protections for foreign intellectual property in a bid to rebalance an economic relationship that Mr. Trump says is unfair for American workers. It remains to be seen how sweeping and significant any agreement will be, and whether it will achieve the lofty promises Mr. Trump has made about resetting the economic relationship with Beijing.
In the meantime, industries from automakers to technology manufacturers to farmers have anxiously awaited an end to the trade war and details of a new agreement, which will have huge implications for their businesses.
The date and location of a summit meeting have also been controversial.
The United States had proposed holding a summit meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida resort, but China has been pushing for an official state visit in Washington, or a neutral location in a third country, people familiar with the matter said. The two sides have been looking to hold it this month, though it could be delayed if a final agreement is not reached soon.
The two sides spent the past two months drawing up more than 120 pages of an agreement covering issues including forced technology transfer and cybertheft, intellectual property rights, currency and nontariff barriers to trade.
The president’s tariffs have been successful at bringing the Chinese to the negotiating table, and his advisers have insisted they will not squander an opportunity to press China for substantial economic reforms that past administrations were unable to secure. Still, the Chinese have balked at making any reforms that could be viewed as infringing on their sovereignty or undercutting the Communist Party’s control of the economy.
“If you and I are making a deal, and you have to drag me kicking and screaming the whole way, what are the odds the deal is going to hold?” asked Derek Scissors, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “I don’t find that the slightest bit convincing.”
In the meantime, Beijing has introduced a steady drumbeat of other reforms intended to please American constituencies and win Mr. Trump’s favor. In the past several weeks, China has resumed purchases of American soybeans and announced it would reclassify fentanyl, which has fueled the American opioid epidemic, as a controlled substance. Beijing also approved a sweeping rewrite of a foreign investment law that may help foreign companies avoid unequal treatment. And it approved a request by JPMorgan Chase to establish a majority owned and controlled securities brokerage firm in the country and floated the idea of expanding access for foreign cloud computing companies.
China experts have cautioned that the long-running economic stresses between the countries are unlikely to be entirely put to rest with this round of negotiations.
“The negotiations no matter what anybody says will not end at the end of this phase,” said David Lampton, a fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “We’ve got decades of painful negotiating with China ahead.”
The White House is also facing pressure to resolve the trade war, which has begun to hurt American farmers, manufacturers and others, and caused wild swings on Wall Street.
Both Democrats and Republicans have urged Mr. Trump to hold out for a tough deal to combat Chinese practices that American businesses have long seen as problematic, including the coerced transfer of foreign technology as a condition of doing business in the country and the ample government subsidies for Chinese firms.
“Last week @POTUS told us he would not sign a ‘good’ trade deal with #China he would only sign a ‘great’ one,” Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said in a Twitter post on Thursday. “I believe him. But to be a ‘great’ deal it must allow us to do in China what they can do in US & it must have real enforcement mechanisms.”
On Thursday, Mr. Rubio joined Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader from New York, and other senators from both parties in unveiling legislation that would levy sanctions on firms involved with illicitly manufacturing and exporting fentanyl to the United States, including in China.
If China were to follow through on the commitments it made to the United States on cracking down on fentanyl, it should have nothing to worry about with the legislation, Mr. Schumer said. But in the past the country had made many promises it failed to enforce.
“As the president meets with the vice premier of China today, we’re here to call China’s bluff,” Mr. Schumer said.
American negotiators have pushed for an enforcement mechanism that would allow tariffs on Chinese goods to snap back if China violated the terms of the deal, and that would forbid China from retaliating. But Chinese negotiators have resisted such an idea, describing it as a potential infringement on their sovereignty.
Myron Brilliant, the executive vice president and head of international affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said foreign stakeholders would be scrutinizing the deal to see whether it contained a strong enforcement mechanism that would hold the Chinese accountable to their obligations.
“That is what would separate this agreement from previous agreements,” he said.
