- President Donald Trump said China is violating a deal struck with the U.S. earlier this month to lower their respective tariffs temporarily and de-escalate a trade war to let negotiations play out. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who helped clinch that agreement in Switzerland, said China is still restricting the flow of key minerals.
U.S. negotiations with China became increasingly public, with President Donald Trump accusing Beijing of violating a trade deal that was struck earlier this month.
After talks in Geneva, Switzerland, both sides agreed on May 12 to slash their respective tariffs from prohibitively high levels for 90 days to let negotiations continue.
“The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US,” Trump wrote in a social media post on Friday. “So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”
His tough talk comes after Wall Street has learned to expect a quick retreat from his harsh measures in what’s been dubbed TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out.
Notably, Trump did not threaten to hike tariffs on China again. Earlier this week, the U.S. Court of International Trade invalidated the extensive tariffs he rolled out on “Liberation Day,” though an appeals court reinstated them with the case likely heading to the Supreme Court.
By contrast, he accused the European Union of slow-walking trade talks last Friday and announced a 50% tariff, then said on Sunday that it would be delayed to July 9.
Similarly, the Trump administration claims China is dragging its feet on trade talks. On Friday, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who helped clinch the agreement with China in Geneva, said China is “slow rolling their compliance, which is completely unacceptable and has to be addressed.”
In particular, he claimed Beijing has not followed through on withdrawing additional retaliation to earlier U.S. tariffs, such as curbing exports of rare earths that are critical to the tech, auto, aerospace, and defense sectors.
“You can just read in the news that China continues to you know slow down and choke off things like critical minerals and rare earth magnets,” Greer told CNBC on Friday.
Like Trump, he also did not threaten punitive action to get China to increase its exports of rare earths. Instead, he said, “we’re trying to work through that with them.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has imposed export curbs of its own this week, restricting critical U.S. technologies such as those related to jet engines, chips, as well as certain chemicals and machinery. Those are reportedly in response to China’s lack of mineral exports.
In a response to Trump’s social-media post and Greer’s comments, a spokesperson for China’s embassy in the U.S. pointed to Trump’s trade restrictions.
“Recently, China has repeatedly raised concerns with the US regarding its abuse of export control measures in the semiconductor sector and other related practices,” Liu Pengyu told Fortune in a statement. “China once again urges the US to immediately correct its erroneous actions, cease discriminatory restrictions against China and jointly uphold the consensus reached at the high-level talks in Geneva.”
