The US government will shortly issue a formal call for public comment on which Chinese products should qualify for lower tariffs under a newly established bilateral “Board of Trade”, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer announced on Tuesday.
“We’ll be putting out a Federal Register notice shortly,” Greer told a Council on Foreign Relations gathering in Washington.
“I’ve seen it, I’ve looked at it, I’ve redlined it personally, and it will be setting up what we’re going to do on the US side, which in the first instance is to put out a call for public comment.”
Washington’s top trade envoy said the process would start by surveying American businesses and the public to assess which goods made the most sense for reciprocal liberalisation.
The move follows a high-profile summit in Beijing this month between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, where the world’s two largest economies agreed to charter the joint board.
The mechanism is designed to initially identify about US$30 billion worth of non-strategic commercial goods on which both nations can mutually lower or eliminate duties.
“If we picked like US$30 billion worth of goods that we wanted to sell [to] China, and we picked out US$30 billion of goods we wanted to buy from China, and we think that’s beneficial trade for us, and we could consider modifying these tariffs to be not quite as high as what we have otherwise, what would those goods be?” Greer said on Tuesday.
The creation of the US-China Board of Trade, alongside a parallel Board of Investment, marked a fundamental shift in Washington’s economic strategy towards Beijing.
Rather than attempting to force structural changes on China’s state-led economic model, the administration is leaning into a highly regulated framework of managed trade.
“We’ve come to terms with the fact that there’s not going to be some giant comprehensive reform of the way the Chinese political system works, including all these economic elements of it, but we can have some managed trade,” Greer said.
He disclosed that a much broader, systemic deal targeting China’s industrial subsidies had reached the highest levels of government in Beijing but was ultimately rejected, noting that Washington accepted that these state interventions remained foundational to Beijing’s governance.
“There was a broader deal made that would have gotten at some of these things, industrial subsidies, etc. And it went all the way to the top in China, and it came back redlined in a way where it’s very clear that they were not going to change some of these things,” Greer said.
Addressing scepticism about the summit’s outcomes, Greer criticised what he described as constantly shifting expectations from political commentators.
“Before we went to China, some people said, ‘Oh, they’re going to go and they’re going to give away the store,’ whatever that means, right?” Greer said. “And then we went, and we continued our plan of strategic stability. We continued to have our tariffs. We continued to try to have a little bit of a managed-trade approach.”
He argued that despite maintaining that stance and securing the stability the administration was seeking, critics still claimed the trip delivered no tangible gains.
“So I want to know, what did people want?” Greer said. “They wanted them to say ‘we’re done being communist, and we’re not going to subsidise’?” -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
