. While the Trump administration had no problem ‘haggling over the price of chickens’ with Beijing, Biden’s team seems focused on the re-establishment of a broader US negotiating position
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| Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He and US President Donald Trump after signing phase one of the US-China trade agreement during a ceremony at the White House on January 15, 2020. Photo: Reuters |
“My predecessor! Oh God, I miss him,” US President Joe Biden jokingly said of Donald Trump last week. But when it comes to trade relations, it will be China who will miss Trump. Beijing will find that dealing with Trump was a walk in the park compared to negotiating with the Biden administration.
Trump is a dealmaker, Biden is a politician. Such was Trump’s focus on securing a trade deal with China, at least according to his former national security adviser John Bolton, in his book The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, that the former US president refused to issue a White House statement on the 30th anniversary of China’s massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.
“Who cares about it? I’m trying to make a deal,” Bolton recorded Trump as saying. And a deal Trump made, but his transactional approach to trade negotiations with Beijing fitted China’s playbook well.
In his memoir, A Promised Land, former US president Barack Obama writes of his own discussions with China’s then premier Wen Jiabao about perceived imbalances in the China-US trade relationship. Obama recalled that Wen suggested that “I just give him a list of US products we wanted China to buy more of and he’d see what he could do.”
“I felt like I was haggling over the price of chickens at a market stall rather than negotiating trade policy between the world’s two largest economies,” Obama added.
The Trump administration had no problem “haggling over the price of chickens”. Last year’s phase one trade deal included an itemised and detailed list of US goods that Washington wanted to sell and Beijing said it would try to buy.
As it was, the Covid-19 pandemic put paid to any hopes that China could meet its first-year purchase commitments, but that may anyway be academic now. Biden’s White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in January that, as regards China-US relations, “everything that the past administration has put in place is under review”, including the phase one trade deal.
That doesn’t mean the Biden administration will abandon the deal or roll back tariffs on specific goods imported from China, tariffs which the Trump administration had enthusiastically imposed. But it will mean less emphasis on the Trump administration’s transactional stance in trade negotiations with China and the re-establishment of a broader US negotiating position.
For example, Trump may have signed legislation last year calling for sanctions over the treatment of China’s Uygurs but the Biden administration has now directly linked the issue to trade.
“The Biden administration is committed to using all available tools to take on the range of China’s unfair trade practices that continue to harm US workers and businesses,” the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) stated in its 2021 Trade Agenda and 2020 Annual Report
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“It will also make it a top priority to address the widespread human rights abuses of the Chinese government’s forced labour programme that targets the Uygurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and elsewhere in the country.”
A broader US negotiating stance towards China on trade also mirrors Biden’s determination to restore good relations with traditional US allies, relations that had been strained by the Trump administration’s “America first” agenda and its unilateral approach to international affairs.
“We’re going to re-establish our alliances,” Biden said last week, while stressing that he had been “very clear” with Chinese President Xi Jinping that this strategy was not “anti-Chinese”, though whether Beijing agrees with that assertion remains to be seen.
It is surely no coincidence that since Biden’s inauguration, others too have become more vocal on the issue of the Uygurs.
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Additionally, unlike Trump, Biden is determined to lead the world in addressing climate change. Washington might adopt a carbon border adjustment tax which would surely impact goods imported into the United States from China, if Beijing retains less stringent environmental controls and fails to adopt a similar scheme.
The USTR’s office stated on March 1 that a carbon border impost, essentially import fees levied by carbon-taxing countries on goods from countries that have not adopted similar environmental taxes, would be one option as Washington devises market and regulatory responses to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
This is a whole new ball game for China-US trade relations. Trump may have been unpredictable, but Beijing is about to find out that haggling over trade with his White House was child’s play compared to dealing with the Biden administration.
