By Kristen Altus. Media: FOXBusiness
Early signs are emerging that China is now “caving” to the U.S. and President Donald Trump on tariffs, according to one foreign policy expert.
Gatestone Institute senior fellow Gordon Chang agreed there’s “a win for Trump” after the president revealed he’s spoken to China about trade tensions and the recent exemption of some U.S. goods from its 125% tariff.
“China is doing this, but it’s not announcing it. It’s just not imposing the tariffs on aviation products, industrial chemicals, and semiconductors. It’s sort of like the Chinese way of doing it,” Chang said on “Varney & Co.” Friday.
“It’s basically, they’re caving, but they don’t want to say they’re caving.”
From the White House lawn Friday morning, President Trump took questions from the press when he was asked the last time he spoke to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“I don’t want to comment on that, but I’ve spoken to him many times,” Trump responded before pivoting to a question about what exactly they discussed: “I’ll let you know at the appropriate time. Let’s see if we can make a deal.”
Though China on Thursday publicly announced it was not negotiating with the U.S. on trade, a later report from Reuters claimed China’s Ministry of Commerce taskforce is collecting lists of items that could be exempted from tariffs and is asking companies to submit their own requests.
Washington has said the current status quo is economically untenable and has already offered tariff exemptions to some electronic goods. But Beijing has taken a harder stance, saying it is willing to fight to the end unless the U.S. lifts its tariffs.
“When you had India a couple days ago slap the 12% tariffs on steel, that was directed at China because they don’t want their market flooded with Chinese steel that otherwise would have gone to the U.S. You’re going to see other countries do the same thing, which really means China is going to have export problems because that’s where they’ve been looking for growth,” the expert analyzed.
“But they can’t grow it in a world like we have today. And besides, when you add deglobalization, this is a really bad story for Beijing.”
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