China would have reached a consensus in principle with US

China and the United States reached an agreement on Friday in the negotiations to try to end the trade war between the two countries.

The Deputy Prime Minister and head of the Chinese negotiating team, Liu He, had a telephone conversation, after an American initiative, with the commercial representative and the secretary of the US Treasury, Robert Lighthizer and Steven Mnuchin, respectively.

“They had a frank and constructive discussion about how to adequately address the main concerns of the other party and reached a first consensus,” the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The American president, Donald Trump, already advanced on Thursday that the agreement was close by indicating that Beijing and Washington would look for another place to sign it after the cancellation of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum (APEC) summit in Chile.

The Lighthizer office, cited by the Reuters news agency, has merely indicated that there has been progress in the negotiations and will continue at the delegate level.

The negotiations are currently focusing on the so-called ‘Phase 1′ of the agreement, which Trump explained via Twitter, covers 60% of the trade agreement between the two largest economies in the world.

This first understanding comes on the same day that an arbitration group of the World Trade Organization (WTO) determined that China had the right to impose compensatory sanctions on US imports worth $ 3.579 million annually, due to Washington’s refusal to eliminate anti-dumping duties against Beijing.

China told the WTO in September 2018 that it had suffered $ 7,043 million annual damages due to U.S. anti-dumping duties, declared illegal in 2016 by the international organization. However, Washington objected the amount, thus opening the arbitration with Beijing, which had to settle for a smaller sum.

K. Tovar

Source: La Vanguardia