The US government will shortly issue a formal call for public comment on which Chinese products should qualify for lower tariffs under a newly established bilateral “Board of Trade”, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer announced on Tuesday.
“We’ll be putting out a Federal Register notice shortly,” Greer told a Council on Foreign Relations gathering in Washington.
“I’ve seen it, I’ve looked at it, I’ve redlined it personally, and it will be setting up what we’re going to do on the US side, which in the first instance is to put out a call for public comment.”
Washington’s top trade envoy said the process would start by surveying American businesses and the public to assess which goods made the most sense for reciprocal liberalisation.
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The move follows a high-profile summit in Beijing this month between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, where the world’s two largest economies agreed to charter the joint board.
The mechanism is designed to initially identify about US$30 billion worth of non-strategic commercial goods on which both nations can mutually lower or eliminate duties.
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“If we picked like US$30 billion worth of goods that we wanted to sell [to] China, and we picked out US$30 billion of goods we wanted to buy from China, and we think that’s beneficial trade for us, and we could consider modifying these tariffs to be not quite as high as what we have otherwise, what would those goods be?” Greer said on Tuesday.
The creation of the US-China Board of Trade, alongside a parallel Board of Investment, marked a fundamental shift in Washington’s economic strategy towards Beijing.