U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer (left) and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He (right)

A great deal to end the U.S.-China trade war seemed still uncertain as Chinese President Xi Jinping is making plans to travel to Mar-a-Lago, Florida, for a summit meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump. Xi is making a scheduled visit to Italy and France and could travel onwards to the U.S., but no firm date has yet been agreed, and President Trump has warned that he would prefer not to sign a deal if it wasn’t “great”. Both countries are trying to reach a deal by the end of the month.

Trade talks with the United States in the last few weeks have been “very difficult” and “very exhausting,” said Chinese Commerce Minister Zhong Shan, the first senior Chinese official to discuss the meetings that took place recently in Beijing and Washington. The two sides are reportedly closing in on a deal to end the trade war that began in July 2018, as progress made prompted the U.S. to drop a plan to raise the tariff rate on USD200 billion worth of Chinese products from 10% to 25%. “I’d say it’s hard and difficult because the two countries have huge differences in their institutions, cultures and stages of development. The two sides had to make extra efforts to reach consensus, so it was very difficult, it is very hard,” Zhong said on the sidelines of the NPC session in Beijing. Zhong, who accompanied Vice Premier Liu He to Washington for the last round of talks in February, said the negotiation, although tough, proved “fruitful” and achieved substantial progress.“It is not easy to achieve such a result, and we should treasure it”, Zhong concluded. “There is a view in the U.S. that so long as the U.S. keeps increasing tariffs, China will back down. They don’t know the history and culture of China,” Zhong said.

U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. will do well “with or without a deal”. U.S. and Chinese officials have said they are making progress toward a resolution of the dispute, but a U.S. diplomat in Beijing said that an agreement was not imminent, although White House Economic Adviser Larry Kudlow told CNBC that talks have “advanced enormously.” The timing, however, is still fluid. “I don’t want to hang a timetable on this,” Kudlow said, adding that U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer “is doing the best he can”.

The U.S. tariff war against its trading partners, particularly China, cost American companies and consumers USD4.4 billion a month last year, according to economists from the New York Federal Reserve and Princeton and Columbia universities, concluding that those who were exposed to the duties overseas “paid none of the bill”. In a paper, titled “The impact of the 2018 trade war on U.S. prices and welfare”, Mary Amiti, Stephen Redding and David Weinstein said fallout from the dispute – which has seen tariffs applied on about USD283 billion of American imports – had damaged the economy. They said the U.S. economy had experienced “substantial increases in the prices of intermediates and final goods, large changes to its supply chain network, reductions in the availability of imported varieties, and complete pass-through of the tariffs into domestic prices of imported goods”. Goods subject to tariffs saw prices rise 10% to 30%, the researchers said, as reported by the South China Morning Post.