United States President Joe Biden said Wednesday that it was too early to promise reducing U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods, but that his chief trade negotiator Katherine Tai was working on the problem.
Critics of the tariff policy, which has been in effect since July 2018, claim it has had no effect on Beijing's economic actions but has harmed the US. . Tariff supporters argue that they are a crucial weapon for safeguarding American workers against China's cheap, state-subsidized goods.
Biden acknowledged the business community's pressure, but said it was insufficient to persuade him to change course - particularly in the absence of significant concessions from China.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai is "currently working on that," Biden said during a news conference marking his first year in office on Wednesday. However, he noted, "the answer is unclear."
China is expected to create a record trade surplus with the United States in 2021, owing in part to Americans' pandemic-fueled demand for Chinese-made goods ranging from smart devices to electronic kitchenware.
Biden's planned new China strategy, originally scheduled for late last year, has been postponed, and he has thus far mostly maintained Trump administration policies while criticizing Chinese officials for alleged human rights violations in Hong Kong and against ethnic Muslims in the Xinjiang region.
China committed to increasing its purchases of American goods across a number of sectors, from oil to wheat to manufactured goods, as part of the phase one agreement.
China has purchased almost 60% of its target through November, according to a research on China-U.S. trade published late last month by Chad Bown, a senior scholar at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
However, politics has continued to trump the economic justification for trade policy, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon, according to Ali Wyne, a Eurasia Group analyst on China-U.S. relations.
Biden stated that he was aware that some business organizations were pressuring him to begin undoing Trump's 25% tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of Chinese imports, which was why Tai was working on the matter.
The United States and the European Union announced in June that they had resolved a long-running dispute between aviation companies Boeing and Airbus - and Tai said this week that the agreement enabled the two parties to work together and instead target Beijing's "harmful" business policies.
Shu Jueting, a representative for China's Ministry of Commerce, indicated Thursday that eliminating U.S. tariffs on Chinese exports will boost global economic recovery, particularly during a period of rising inflation.
