U.S.-China trade deal will nearly double U.S. exports to China

The “phase one” U.S.-China trade deal will nearly double U.S. exports to China over the next two years and is “totally done” despite the need for translation and revisions to its text, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said on Sunday.

Lighthizer, speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation” program, said there would be some routine “scrubs” to the text but “this is totally done, absolutely.”

A date for senior U.S. and Chinese officials to formally sign the agreement is still being determined, Lighthizer said.

The deal, announced on Friday after more than two and a half years of on-and-off negotiations between Washington and Beijing, will reduce some U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods in exchange for increased Chinese purchases of U.S. agricultural, manufactured and energy products by some $200 billion over the next two years.

China has also pledged in the agreement to better protect U.S. intellectual property, to curb the coerced transfer of American technology to Chinese firms, to open its financial services market to U.S. firms and to avoid manipulation of its currency.

Chinese purchases of agricultural goods are expected to increase to $40 billion to $50 billion annually over the next two years, Lighthizer said. The United States exported about $24 billion in farm products to China in 2017, the last full year before the world’s two largest economies launched a tariff war on each others’ goods in July 2018.

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