President Donald Trump delayed the imposition of higher U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods Monday just hours before they were slated to go into effect.
By putting off the tariff deadline, Trump extended the truce his administration struck with China in May, after a tit-for-tat trade war between the two countries resulted in the U.S. threatening 145 percent tariffs on Chinese goods and China raising its tariff rate on some goods to 125 percent. At the time China also stopped exports of rare earth magnets to the U.S.
China and the U.S. eventually reached a truce, which resulted in substantially lower tariff rates, and the two countries have been engaged in negotiations since. U.S. tariffs on China will remain at 30 percent until November, when the new 90-day deadline expires, Trump said in an executive order.
“The United States continues to have discussions with the [People’s Republic of China] to address the lack of trade reciprocity in our economic relationship and our resulting national and economic security concerns,” Trump said. “Through these discussions, the PRC continues to take significant steps toward remedying non-reciprocal trade arrangements and addressing the concerns of the United States relating to economic and national security matters.”
Trump has proposed the idea of a U.S.-China summit in the fall to negotiate a deal that may include artificial intelligence technology, energy, rare earths, and China’s purchase of Russian oil.
“We hope the U.S. will continue to work with China to implement the important consensus reached during the two heads of state’s phone call, make full use of the China-U.S. economic and trade consultation mechanism, and, on the basis of equality, mutual respect and reciprocity, enhance understanding, reduce misperceptions, and strengthen cooperation,” Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said in a statement.
As the U.S. delays further tariffs on China, Trump has imposed steep 50 percent tariffs on another large trading partner, India, in part because of the country’s purchase of Russian oil. As it stands, China imports more Russian oil than India.
“India has not been a good trading partner, because they do a lot of business with us, but we don’t do business with them. So we settled on 25 percent [tariffs] but I think I’m going to raise that very substantially over the next 24 hours, because they’re buying Russian oil. They’re fueling the war machine,” Trump said last week before he hiked the tariff rate to 50 percent.