US President Donald Trump on Thursday signaled a potential end to the tit-for-tat tariff hikes between the U.S. and China that shocked markets, and that a deal over the fate of social media platform TikTok may have to wait.
“I don’t want them to go higher because at a certain point you make it where people don’t buy,” Trump told reporters about tariffs at the White House.
“So, I may not want to go higher or I may not want to even go up to that level. I may want to go to less because you know you want people to buy and, at a certain point, people aren’t gonna buy.”
Trump said China had been in touch since the imposition of tariffs and expressed optimism that they could reach a deal.
While the two sides are in touch, sources told Reuters that free-flowing, high-level exchanges of the sorts that would lead to a deal have largely been absent.
Speaking with reporters, Trump repeatedly declined to specify the nature of talks between the countries or whether they directly included Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Trump has repeatedly extended a legal deadline for China-based ByteDance to divest the U.S. assets of the short video app used by 170 million Americans. On Thursday, he said a spin-off deal would likely wait until the trade issue is settled.
“We have a deal for TikTok, but it’ll be subject to China so we’ll just delay the deal ’til this thing works out one way or the other,” Trump said.
Trade war
Trump’s remarks indicated a reduced willingness to impose steep, wide-ranging tariff hikes on numerous countries, following the market turmoil triggered by their rollout on April 2.
The Republican president slapped 10% tariffs on most goods entering the country but delayed the implementation of higher levies, pending negotiations.
The Donald Trump administration has been ramping up pressure on China by raising import tariffs on Chinese goods in recent months. On Tuesday, the White House published a fact sheet stating that China now faces up to a 245% tariff. Beijing has retaliated with its own counter-measures.
China’s commerce ministry on Tuesday urged the United States to stop putting “extreme pressure” on the world’s second-largest economy and demanded respect in any trade talks, but the two sides remained at an impasse over who should start those talks.
The Chinese commerce ministry criticised the tariffs as irrational and said Beijing will ignore the “meaningless” tariff numbers game. It has also warned that China will “fight to the end” if the U.S. insists on heaping substantial damage on China’s rights and interests.
“The unilateral tariff increases were entirely initiated by the United States,” He Yongqian, a Chinese commerce ministry spokesperson, told a weekly news conference.
Unlike a number of nations that have responded to Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” by seeking deals with Washington, Beijing has been upping its own levies on U.S. goods in response and has not sought talks, which it says can only be conducted on the basis of mutual respect and equality. ET
