US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping both insisted Friday they would resist pressure to give ground on a trade deal that Washington’s leader said could be “very close.”
The comments from Trump and Xi came six weeks after the announcement of a “phase one” bargain, which appears no closer to becoming a reality as the two sides tussle over tariffs and China’s future purchases of US farm exports.
In Beijing on Friday, President Xi Jinping said China wants a deal but is “not afraid” to “fight back” if necessary.
Trump’s reply came several hours later in a freewheeling live dial-in to Fox News in which he told on-air hosts the deal was “potentially very close” but that Xi was under greater pressure to strike a bargain.
“He wants to make a deal much more than I want to make it. I’m not anxious to make it,” Trump said.
He also said that, when it comes to Hong Kong, he is balancing competing interests, stopping short of pledging to sign new US legislation to support the restive semi-autonomous city’s democracy movement.
US regulators on Friday also turned up the pressure on Chinese telecoms firms ZTE and Huawei, branding them threats to national security and barring them from multi-billion-dollar subsidy programs for wireless equipment and services.
The Huawei controversy in particular has landed squarely in the middle of the trade conflict, raising the question of whether Trump could offer some concessions on access to the US market to grease wheels in the trade negotiations.
The world’s two biggest economies have been locked in a bruising trade conflict for more than a year, hitting each other with volleys of tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods.
