Trump Has Quite the Warning for China

By Washington Examiner. President Trump pledged not to “tolerate [China’s] abuse” of the U.S. economy Tuesday, denouncing the rising Pacific power as an predator in international markets at the United Nations General Assembly of world leaders.

“Those days are over,” Trump said of past U.S. trade policy. “We will no longer tolerate such abuse. We will not allow our workers to be victimized, our companies to be cheated, and our wealth to be plundered and transferred. America will never apologize for protecting its citizens.”

Trump identified China’s entrance to the World Trade Organization as a blow to American blue-collar workers, blaming it for the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs and an increase in trade deficits.

Trump has imposed $250 billion in tariffs on Chinese products, prompting China — the world’s second-largest economy — to impose retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. He has imposed additional tariffs on steel and aluminum imports on Canada, Mexico, and European Union, aimed at preventing China from dumping metal through third-party countries. (Read more from “Trump Has Quite the Warning for China” HERE)

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U.S. Trade Chief Says China Policy Change ‘Not Going to Be Easy’

By Reuters. U.S. President Donald Trump’s top trade official said on Tuesday that changing China’s economic policies to become more market-oriented “is not going to be easy” even with tariffs now in place on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, in rare public remarks at the Concordia Summit, said “endless dialogues” with the Chinese government over decades had “failed miserably” in changing Beijing’s policies, so the Trump administration decided to try direct pressure with tariffs based on its study of China’s intellectual property and technology transfer policies.

After China retaliated against what he called “modest” U.S. tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese technology-focused imports, the Trump administration on Monday slapped 10 percent duties on another $200 billion of Chinese goods, including many consumer products.

“We enter into that soberly with an enormous amount of study, but the fact is that what we were doing demonstrably failed,” Lighthizer said.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Lighthizer said when asked what would result in concessions from Beijing. “Change is never easy, particularly where we have change, where there are U.S. companies that are benefiting from the improper Chinese policy,” he said. (Read more from “U.S. Trade Chief Says China Policy Change ‘Not Going to Be Easy'” HERE)

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