US-China trade deal is near, expert says: ‘they are going to stabilise this’

The United States and China could reach a trade agreement as early as next week, according to a Harvard scholar, who has offered clues on the state of negotiations weeks after the two rival economies agreed to a trade truce.

Graham Allison, founding dean of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, told a World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Tianjin on Thursday: “We’re all sitting on the edge of our seats, waiting to see what comes out of the ongoing conversations between the two governments, but you can be sure they’re very intense currently.”

“I would be surprised if in the next week or so we do not see an MOU (memorandum of understanding) coming out of the discussions that have been going on between Bessent and He and their teams in the intermediate period,” he said, referring to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and China’s Vice-Premier He Lifeng, who have been leading the trade talks.

Allison, who served as assistant secretary of defence under former US president Bill Clinton, said markets tend to behave unsympathetically and when extreme measures like embargoes are introduced, “pretty soon you’ll look and see what happens in the real world that is unsustainable”.

In the case of the heated export control competition between the US and China, he said both sides realised their respective domestic firms would face disruptions because of their measures.

  

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