China, US hold new virtual meeting on economic issues
Beijing, Jun 2 (EFE).- China and the United States held a virtual meeting on economic issues this Wednesday (Tuesday, Washington time), the second of its kind since the arrival of President Joe Biden to the White House.
On this occasion, Liu He, the leading Chinese negotiator on this matter and one of the four vice premiers of the country, spoke with US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday morning local time, the state news agency Xinhua reported.
The two representatives “conducted extensive exchanges on the macroeconomic situation and bilateral and multilateral cooperation,” said the text, which added that they “candidly exchanged views on issues of mutual concern, and expressed willingness to maintain communication.”
“The two sides believed that the China-U.S. economic relations are very important,” added Xinhua.
On May 27, Liu spoke with the US Trade Representative Katherine Tai in what was the first time – since Biden’s accession to the US presidency – in which Beijing and Washington officially addressed their trade relations, stagnant since March 2018 due to the trade war started by former president Donald Trump.
In March, Tai announced that Washington did not plan to lift the tariffs imposed on Chinese products imposed during the Trump administration in the short term.
During Trump’s term, the US imposed tariffs on Chinese products worth about $370 billion annually, around three-quarters of the Asian country’s exports, to which Beijing responded with its own measures against US exports.
The relationship between the two countries began to deteriorate in March 2018, with the start of the trade war and the consequent exchange of tariff impositions, and later led to clashes in the diplomatic and technology sectors, among others. EFE
jt/tw
