The Manchurian President

Experts pan Trump’s ‘early harvest’ trade deal with China 
Trump is outplayed by Beijing as ‘gigantic’ agreement draws derision 
By Shawn Donnan in Washington

Mongolism: Donald Trump had touted the 'early harvest' deal as 'Herculean' 

From the moment he descended an escalator at Trump Tower almost two years ago and announced his presidential candidacy, Donald Trump has vowed to put the US back on a winning path in its trade dealings with China.
“I beat China all the time. All the time,” he declared to cheers that day in June 2015. 
But did Trump just get outplayed in his first trade negotiation with China?
A deal announced on Friday by officials in Beijing and Washington was billed as “gigantic” and “Herculean” by his administration in its efforts to reset the relationship between the world’s two largest economies.
It also marked a major de-escalation from Mr Trump’s bellicose campaign rhetoric and widespread fears that he might set off a trade war.
To former US officials, Trump advisers, business executives and other close watchers of the US-China relationship, however, this was a poor deal in which Beijing had simply reheated old promises.
They say it raises questions about the Trump administration’s strategic wherewithal and the very negotiating muscle the president has so often touted. 
“This is disappointing on many levels,” says Dan DiMicco, former chief executive of US steelmaker Nucor and a campaign adviser to Trump.
“We are rewarding China before stopping their massive trade cheating.”  
“They got played,” was the blunter assessment of one former US official.
The “early harvest” deal rolled out on Friday saw China agree to resume imports of US beef that were suspended in 2003, in a move that US cattle ranchers hailed as “historic” but which Chinese leaders had already agreed to last September.  
Beijing also committed to open its market to foreign-owned credit rating agencies and credit card companies — a pledge that addressed long-running US gripes but also resembled previous promises.
Ahead of China’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organisation, it had agreed to open credit cards — or the broader market for electronic payments made in renminbi — to foreign-owned companies such as Visa and MasterCard.
For its part the US has agreed to encourage natural gas sales to Chinese buyers and opened the door to imports of cooked chicken from China. 
More importantly, it offered its endorsement for Beijing’s “Belt and Road” project to revive the ancient trade route to Europe by sending a delegation to a Beijing summit that started on Saturday. 
That move upended the arm’s-length approach of the Obama administration and left the Trump administration struggling to explain why Trump was embracing a project many see as Beijing’s latest effort to replace the US as a trading and military power in the Asia-Pacific region. 
According to the administration, the deal — part of a 100-day plan hatched by Trump and Xi Jinping during the Florida summit in April — will turn out to be the first of many.
But experts say that in its impatience to get a deal done, the new US administration had given up many key points of leverage that would have been useful for future negotiations. 
Meanwhile, in the name of reducing a trade deficit with China worth more than $300bn last year, the administration showed no signs of addressing bigger strategic economic issues such as Beijing’s efforts to force US companies to use Chinese technology or to buy US companies in key sectors. 
“[The Trump administration has] a single metric for trade success and that’s ‘have we reduced the trade deficit with a country?’, says Robert Atkinson, head of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based think-tank.
“And the Chinese fundamentally don’t care about the deficit. They are willing to give that away. What they care about is dominance in advanced industries.” 
Rufus Yerxa, president of the US National Foreign Trade Council, acknowledges that progress on some longstanding issues has been encouraging. 
“But there are a lot of major concerns about the way China is operating and the things that China does,” he says, pointing to Chinese restrictions on tech products and cloud computing. 
“It’s a bit concerning that those issues aren’t front and centre,” he says. 
Mr DiMicco says that with its promise to sell more natural gas to China, the Trump administration risked undermining what is now an important competitive advantage for US industry — cheap energy costs — and the manufacturing renaissance it has promised.  
“When the gas exports [to China] get large enough, which they will, it will drive up natural gas prices for our domestic manufacturers, and negatively impact our reshoring efforts,” he says. 
It also could have longer-term consequences for the US, he warns.
“We do not want to have a colonial-like trade relationship with China whereby we try to balance our trade by sending them raw materials and farm products and they send us increasingly high-technology products.”