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Trump or Clinton, US ties to prosper
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CHINA and the United States will keep developing positive relations no matter who wins November’s US presidential election, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang told an economic forum in New York on Tuesday.
But he declined to comment on which candidate he favored.
Republican Donald Trump has threatened to slap tariffs on Chinese goods and push for tougher trade talks if elected. His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, has changed tack on trade, backing away from a Pacific trade pact she previously endorsed.
Li, who was attending the UN General Assembly in New York, said the election was a matter for the US, so what he could say was very limited.
However, he added: “No matter who gets elected in the US presidential election, I believe that China-US ties will continue to grow steadily and in a positive direction.”
At the forum, Li responded to complaints from foreign business leaders about restricted access to the Chinese market by saying China was open to foreign investment, although some economic sectors were not yet mature.
He said: “This process of them becoming more mature is also a process for them to open up, and the areas of the Chinese economy open to foreign investment will only increase and China will only open its door even wider. The door will not close.”
Referring to negotiations over a US-China Bilateral Investment Treaty that are lengthy given disagreements over access to sectors both sides deem sensitive, Li said that as long as both countries took a strong and pragmatic approach, they would be able to reach a mutually beneficial agreement.
As an example of China’s willingness to open up its markets, Li said China had decided to designate a Chinese investment bank as a clearing bank for yuan business in New York and welcomed banks in the city which met eligibility requirements to become clearing banks for the currency.
He also said China would soon allow imports of beef on the bone from the US, now that Chinese quarantine procedures had been completed.
Li said China would not engineer a devaluation of its currency to boost exports for an economy that is growing at its slowest rate in two decades. Some critics in Washington have said Beijing is still manipulating its currency, although the US Treasury says its assessment is that it is not undervalued.
China’s economy will continue its growth momentum this year, Li said.
“I can say here that in the third quarter of this year, or until the end of this year, China’s economy will maintain this momentum of steady growth.”
The growth target for 2016 is 6.5 to 7 percent. In the second quarter of this year, the world’s second-largest economy grew 6.7 percent compared to a year ago, according to official data.
In other remarks, Li said frictions played only a minor part in China-US economic relations, and he called on both two sides to expand common interests and properly handle differences.
When bilateral trade and investment grow from nearly nothing to its current enormous volume, it is only inevitable frictions might arise, he said.
They are not the dominating element in China-US economic relations, Li said, but they should not be ignored and both sides should work to resolve differences before they spread to other areas of the relationship.
Li, who attended a series of United Nations conferences and engagements with a wide spectrum of Americans while he was in New York, earlier met President Barack Obama to call for concerted efforts to promote economic and trade ties between the world’s top two economies.
Economic and trade cooperation is the “cornerstone” and the “propeller” of China-US relations, Li said during their talks.
Obama expressed his support for China’s reform process and hoped the two sides could make further progress in bilateral investment treaty negotiations.
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