China urges Trump to acknowledge the mistake of tariffs

BarcelonaThe United States and China continue to maintain their trade war with swords raised. But the fact that President Donald Trump's administration decided to withdraw reciprocal tariffs on some technological products, even those made in China, has led to conflicting interpretations on both sides. For the Chinese, it's a downright concession by the Trump administration. For the White House, it's all part of a plan that's unfolding as planned.

On Saturday, it became known that the US administration had sent an instruction to Customs stating that a number of technological goods, such as chips, were exempt from reciprocal tariffs, even for Chinese products. smartphones, computers, flat screens, or memory cards. By the weekend, little information had come out of the White House about this setback.

But the Chinese administration has not hesitated to view this instruction from US Customs as a complete rectification and is putting pressure on the Trump administration to open negotiations. The Beijing government responded this Sunday that the elimination of tariffs on technology products is a "small step" in correcting an erroneous decision, but has asked the US president to acknowledge the "mistake" he has made and completely annul the additional taxes he ordered on April 2.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce indicated that it is currently "evaluating the significance of the impact" of the exemptions, but nevertheless estimated that "it is a small step in correcting the erroneous practice represented by reciprocal tariffs." Beijing believes that, since the outbreak of the tariff war, "the United States has not only failed to resolve any internal problems, but has seriously undermined the international economic and trade order, seriously interfering in the normal production and operation of businesses and people's lives and consumption, and has harmed others."

In this sense, the Chinese government urges the United States to "listen to rational voices" both within and outside its borders and to continue this decision with "a major step to correct its mistakes, and completely eliminate this practice" in order to "return to the path of mutual respect and the resolution of differences through dialogue on equal terms."

In the United States, however, the reading is completely the opposite. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro—the main advocate of the tariff policy—has avoided referring to the exemptions to the tariffs introduced this weekend by the United States on electronic products and has reached out to China to end the trade war. Of course, with conditions: as long as the Asian giant stimulates domestic consumption and stops behaving like a "predator" at the expense of the Americans.

In an interview with NBC, Navarro declined to specifically address the exemptions, simply stating that any future decision will depend on the results of the investigation that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is conducting into the supply chains for these types of products. "We will soon see measures," Navarro stated during the interview on the network, in which he defended the trade strategy adopted by US President Donald Trump in the face of criticism that his decisions are erratic.

Planned plan

"This is playing out exactly as we expected. The world is deceiving us. It has been deceiving us for decades. They deceive us with tariffs. But even more importantly, they deceive us with so-called non-tariff barriers, like VAT," Navarro asserted. "In this strategy, the president says: we will charge those people the same as they charge us," Navarro simplified, before insisting on the complexity of the issue. "It's easy to calculate the tariff differential, but non-tariff barriers are much higher, and we did that [raising tariffs] knowing full well that many countries would come directly to us to sit down and negotiate," he indicated.

Trump's advisor has not confirmed whether there are currently open contacts with China. "We have extended an invitation," he simply stated, although he assured that the US president maintains a "very good relationship" with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. "We're going through a period where we hope to be able to overcome this," Navarro said before justifying the need to impose additional tariffs on China, which he accused of facilitating the trafficking of the drug fentanyl, of taking away "more than five million manufacturing jobs," and of carrying out cyberattacks. "We need to be clear about this. That said, it would be good for China to do what it needs to do, which is move toward a more domestically driven economy and stop being the world's predator," he concluded.

For his part, Howard Lutnick clarified this Sunday in an interview with ABC that the decision to apply tariff exemptions to a series of electronic products is "only temporary." According to Lutnick, these products will be subject to new "semiconductor tariffs," which would be approved "in one or two months."