The agreement provides for increased legal protection for China`s patents, trademarks, copyrights, including improved criminal and civil proceedings to combat online violations, piracy and counterfeiting. At the 45th G7, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: “We don`t like tariffs overall.” [336] An ABC article reported that U.S. allies warned Trump of his trade war with China during the summit, but that Trump said he was not under pressure from his allies because of the trade war. [336] European Council President Donald Tusk has said that the trade war could be a global recession. [337] In 2018 and 2019, tariffs imposed by the United States and China on imports from each other have decimated bilateral trade. The Trump administration negotiated the legal text of the Phase 1 agreement to force China to buy an additional $200 billion of U.S. goods and services in addition to 2017 (not 2019) if bilateral trade was more robust.2 The legal evaluation of the agreement therefore requires a comparison of 2020 with 2017. While updates on the trade war have informed investors of much of the past two years, the official signing of the agreement has been greeted with a shrug. The S-P 500 increased by about 0.2%. An indicator for semiconductor companies, which were particularly sensitive to the trade war, fell by more than 1 percent. Since the 1980s, President Trump has often advocated tariffs to reduce the U.S.
trade deficit and encourage domestic production by saying the country was being “ripped off” by its trading partners, and the imposition of tariffs has been an important part of his presidential campaign. [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] He stated in early 2011 that it was almost impossible for our companies to compete with Chinese companies because China was manipulating their currency. [27] At the time, Alan Tonelson of the U.S. Business and Industry Council said China`s undervaluation rate was at least 40%, and said tariffs were the only way to fix it: “Nothing else has worked, nothing else will work.” [27] People`s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, said that China will be able to withstand the trade war and that Trump`s policy is affecting American consumers. [269] “Today we are taking an important step that has never been taken with China toward a future of fair and reciprocal trade with China,” Trump said at a White House ceremony. “Together, we are correcting the injustices of the past.” In November 2019, Jim Cramer said the trade war between the United States and China would continue for a long time if China did not buy a considerable amount of U.S. products to prove the validity of the free trade quota arguments in the Trump administration. [323] In an april 2018 article in Forbes, Harry G.