After cancelling the second phase of trade negotiations with China, Trump has said that he would not trade with a country that has virtually unleashed a pandemic into the world.
In an interview to CBS News, Trump said: “I'm not interested right now in talking to China. We made a great trade deal (the Phase 1 trade agreement signed in January). But as soon as the deal was done, the ink wasn’t even dry, and they hit us with the plague.”
Phase 1 of the deal related to US supplies to China, access to China’s financial market, and issues of intellectual property rights. The second phase focussed on China’s technology transfer policies, industrial espionage, and government subsidies to state-owned enterprises, Reuters reported.
Simultaneously, the Trump administration has stepped up pressure on China over its imposition of a new security law on Hong Kong, which effectively undoes the ‘one country, two systems’ form of administration.
The US administration has ended the ‘special status’ according to Hong Kong, and imposed sanctions on Chinese officials. “Now Hong Kong would be treated the same as mainland China,” Trump was quoted as saying by BBC.
China has vowed to take strong retaliatory action against the US.