Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross noted Wednesday that trade talks between the world’s two largest economies, the U.S. and China, are currently on hiatus.
“I don’t know that I would call it a continued impasse. We are where we are. And in any negotiation, there are ups and downs. There are hiatuses and there are much more active periods. So, it appears as though we may be in something of a hiatus now,” he said.
Shortly after Ross made his comments, President Donald Trump appeared on Fox Business Network, saying that the two countries were not ready to restart negotiations. “They want to make a deal. I said you guys are not ready yet,” he noted. “You’re just not ready because look, they have been taking $500 billion a year out of our country. It is time that we stopped,” the President continued.
CNBC informs that on Sunday, Trump’s top economic advisor Larry Kudlow stressed that U.S.-China relations have “not been positive lately.”
Earlier in the summer, a senior Trump administration official told the news outlet that despite reports of trade talks between the two countries, there has not been any engagement with China. Other officials, both American and Chinese, have suggested talks may be advanced at the G-20 summit in Argentina, but Ross said such meetings hardly ever address such complex issues due to time constraints.
“Meetings of world leaders at the G-20 never get into huge amounts of detail. You can’t do a multi-thousand-page trade agreement in an hour,” he said.
Ross’s comments followed an announcement by the Trump administration that the country would withdraw from a United Nations postal agreement, dating back 144 years, which they say gave countries, including China, unfair advantages over domestic shippers.
During the interview, Ross further commented on the failed $44 billion deal between American chipmaker Qualcomm and NXP, implying that China’s motivation for not signing the deal might have been political.
“The Chinese say that was not related to trade disputes, but you never know. All I know is everybody else approved it, but they turned it down.”
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