“When the U.S. and China fight, nobody wins, as the past year’s market gyrations, lost deals, and strained diplomatic ties have made abundantly clear,” said Peter Robinson, chief executive of the United States Council for International Business. “American business continues to have major problems with China’s commercial policies, but we simply must find a way to tackle these that doesn’t turn our most competitive companies into collateral damage.”
Mr. Robinson suggested that the United States should team up with other trading partners to pressure China to change its ways and work with the World Trade Organization to adjudicate its complaints.
The United States and China appeared to be closing in on an agreement after more than a year of talks. Despite the sense of optimism, which Mr. Trump had often fanned, some of the president’s top advisers signaled last week that the administration was running out of patience.
Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles last week, Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff, said that the talks would not “go on forever.” Mr. Mnuchin said the negotiations were in their “final laps” and noted that it would soon be evident if it were time to strike a deal or walk away.
Asked at the conference if he was feeling optimistic about the talks, Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of Blackstone and a confidant of Mr. Trump, rolled his eyes and said, “we’ll see.”
After Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Lighthizer returned from a trip to Beijing last week, they were angered to receive from their Chinese counterparts a new draft of the agreement with major revisions to provisions they thought had been agreed to. According to people who have been tracking the talks, Chinese officials determined that many of the concessions they were being asked to make would clash with Chinese laws, which the government was not prepared to change.
“The administration has been talking to China for months now about specific things that needed to change in Chinese law,” said Clete Willems, a former member of Mr. Trump’s trade team who left recently to become a partner at the law firm Akin Gump. “The administration was operating under the assumption that some of that would be part of the deal, so to the extent that China is saying that’s no longer possible, that is a pretty big reversal.”
