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Republican senators who visited China last week left optimistic that President Donald Trump can clinch deals on aerospace and key agricultural goods when he lands in Beijing on Wednesday.
The leader of the latest Hill delegation, Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., on Monday summed up his goals for Trump’s trip with an alliteration: “If there’s a headline I hope to see this week coming out of Beijing, it would be what we talked [about] this last week — and that is Boeing, beef and beans.”
Daines, a close Trump ally who brought long-running experience in US-China relations to the trip, met with Chinese officials alongside Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and Deb Fischer, R-Neb.
Administration officials have so far declined to preview the trade and investment deals on the table when Trump sits down with Xi Jinping on Thursday. But the potential progress they have alluded to aligns broadly with the priorities that GOP senators shared with Semafor; agriculture, energy, and aerospace are high on the list.
Both Moran and Daines said they are hopeful Trump can get China to boost its purchases of US soybeans, which Moran told Semafor would be “very important to agriculture at a time when prices are not sufficient to cover the costs.”
The same goes for grain sorghum, Moran said; Daines also pointed to chickpeas, wheat and barley.
Daines and Fischer also said they were looking for officials to agree on renewing US beef producers’ licenses to export to China, which China allowed to lapse last year amid the countries’ trade war. Daines said he “made a specific request” to Chinese officials during their visit “that we resolve this issue.”
“There’s some registrations that need to be streamlined that China’s been holding back on with USDA, and also with FDA, that I brought up a number of times” during the trip, Fischer told Semafor. “So there’s some non-trade barriers that China could be helpful with.”
Officials also discussed the possibility that “China would open their markets to Boeing planes,” Moran said. The firm, whose CEO is among those the White House invited to join its trip, is headquartered in Cantwell’s Washington state.
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Senators were still in the dark Monday on the potential mechanics of a proposed Board of Trade and Board of Investment governing US-China economic relations. Moran said those proposed bodies could serve as “a way for non-sensitive transactions to take place in a more routine manner.”
It’s just as unclear to many on the Hill whether any agreement on export controls could get finalized during Trump’s trip. The US and China are currently weighing whether to extend a one-year bilateral agreement that eased restrictions on rare earth trade.
“We were well-received [by Chinese officials], and certainly … they seem to be open to opportunities for additional sales imports,” Moran said. “But that, of course, is all wrapped up in a lot of other issues that I’m sure the president will have to deal with.”
Notable
- Daines, who lived in China for six years while working for Procter and Gamble before his election, told Semafor last year that “I want to use my experience and relationships I had, and the respect I have in China, to be able to clearly communicate President Trump’s policies.”