Just weeks after the US and China penned the first part of a trade deal intended to settle years of tariff wars, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and shut down the global economy, sending trade into a tailspin. The deal was heavily premised on pledges to buy a minimum volume of goods from the other country.
US Trade Representative Katherine Tai said Wednesday she expects to meet with her Chinese counterpart, vice-premier and head of the Communist Party of China’s Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission, Liu He, “in the near term” to discuss implementation thus far of the January 2020 trade deal.
“It’s the agreement that we have, it’s the agreement that we will work from, that we will build from,” Tai said. “It is our responsibility in the Biden-Harris administration to carry forward the relationship, where we do not shy away from being tough, but where we also know we must be fair and must be future focus-oriented,” Tai said.
While Tai was born and raised in the United States, her parents are from Taiwan and she is fluent in Mandarin.
Phase 1 of the trade deal was signed in January 2020 and expires at the end of the year. In it, the two nations pledged to buy certain minimum amounts of products from the other side, spanning a variety of agricultural and manufactured goods. However, in March of that year, the COVID-19 novel coronavirus outbreak had reached the scale of a global pandemic and nations began curbing international trade in a bid to stop the spread of the highly infectious respiratory disease, putting fulfillment of the pact in danger.
While China’s lockdowns ended in the middle of 2020 and its economy had come roaring back by the end of the year, the pandemic has persisted in the United States, where the deadliest months came in late 2020 and early 2021, and daily new COVID-19 cases have still not declined below 40,000 per day.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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