By David Lawder and Doina Chiacu
WASHINGTON, April 7 (Reuters) – The U.S. economic and trade relationship with China is stable and President Donald Trump will aim to keep it that way in a meeting next month with Chinese President Xi Jinping, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on Tuesday.
“What we are not looking for is massive confrontation or anything like that” with China, Greer told an event hosted by the Hudson Institute think tank.
Greer said that the world’s two largest economies have settled into a stable situation in which the United States is able to access Chinese rare earths and maintains substantial tariffs on Chinese goods.
“When we think about what to expect for the president’s meeting … we’re looking to maintain that stability. We’re looking to ensure we can continue to get rare earths from the Chinese.”
Greer, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng discussed issues involving rare earths in Paris in March, including minerals that go through third countries before they make it to the United States.
Although an initial Trump-Xi summit in Beijing was postponed due to the Iran war, Greer said that minister and staff-level consultations on rare earths have continued.
“It would be nice not to have it come up at the leaders’ meeting,” Greer said of the rare earths issue. “It’d be nice if we could resolve it at the ministers’ level and the staff level, and hopefully we’re in a position to do that. But, of course, the president, as he has in the past, he will continue to advocate for U.S. access to rare earths.”
Greer said that the United States is working on plurilateral agreements to boost alternative supplies of critical minerals, but these need price floor mechanisms to protect production from potential future predatory price cuts by China.
The United States and China, Greer said, are working on forming a Board of Trade mechanism for Trump and Xi to consider, which would determine what the two countries could sustainably trade with each other without crossing national security red lines.
Greer also said that there have been discussions about forming a possible Board of Investment between the two countries, but it would discuss discrete issues related to investment, such as roadblocks to specific company investments in the United States or China, but not broad policy.
Trump has said that he would be open to the idea of Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD starting a plant in the United States, but U.S. lawmakers have voiced increasing concern that allowing such investments from state-supported Chinese automakers would create an existential threat to the market-driven economics of the American auto industry.
“I would say it’s different in nature than the Board of Trade, which is going to be very concrete about exchange of goods,” Greer said of the investment mechanism. “With investment, I don’t think we’re at the point in our relationship with the Chinese where we want to talk about the investment programs either way, right? We really need to get that trade deficit under control.”
(Reporting by David Lawder and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Will Dunham)
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