- Finance Vice-Minister Liao Min leads Chinese negotiation team for first time
- Discussions prepare the way for top-level talks in October
China's Finance Vice-Minister Liao Min will go to the United States for trade negotiations on Wednesday, state-run news agency Xinhua has reported.
Liao will lead a delegation to Washington in preparation for the face-to-face meeting to be held next month between Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
Liao is also a deputy director of the Office of the Central Commission for Financial and Economic Affairs, a Communist Party organ in charge of supervising economic work. It will be the first time he has taken a lead role in high-stakes trade talks.
Liu, Lighthizer and Mnuchin this month held a phone conversation and agreed to meet in October. US President Donald Trump has also announced he will delay a tariffs hike from October 1 to October 15.
On Monday, Lighthizer told top business executives that there was still much work to be done to reach a trade deal with China, according to US Chamber of Commerce chief executive Tom Donohue.
"He laid it out by saying this is an extraordinary challenge, and when it all fell apart some months ago they were very, very close to a workable agreement," Donohue said at a press conference on Monday.
The chamber chief said Lighthizer had not mentioned the possibility of an interim deal that could de-escalate trade tensions by further delaying tariff escalations.
Negotiations broke down in early May after the US side said Beijing had balked at American demands that it enshrine in domestic law major changes to address core US concerns about intellectual property and forced technology transfer.
When Lighthizer and Mnuchin travelled to Shanghai in July, China made no moves towards addressing US demands, further angering Trump.
"He was pretty clear that we have to do this one step at a time but that this has to be a real agreement," Donohue said, referring to Lighthizer.
"A real agreement, in my opinion, will not be buying more crops and doing the small things that would be good to set the stage for us to have more substantive conversations."
More to come …
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