Greer: US Seeking Advice on What to Include in $30 Billion in Non-Sensitive Trade

Greer said the U.S. is aiming to lower tariffs on $30 billion worth of imports.

Once the stakeholder input is received, Greer said, his staff will negotiate with their Chinese counterparts "over where we think we have the strongest mutually beneficial trade with our countries."

Greer, who was speaking on Bloomberg TV before leaving China May 15, rejected the reporter's line of reasoning, where she asked if that wouldn't result in China having a lower tariff rate on some goods than allies who make the same products. He pointed out there have been carve-outs from tariffs all along, and that some countries get favorable treatment on some products, like the president's promise to remove the 10% tariff on whisky from the U.K.

"So it's not out of the norm of what this administration is doing, to have nuance in how we're approaching it, kind of picking and choosing how we wanna trade with countries," he said.

While the changes on tariff rates for China could be months down the road, Greer said the meeting between President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping already scored some wins for U.S. exporters, including Boeing, and agricultural producers.

On Air Force One on May 15, Trump told reporters, "President Xi's an incredible guy. Got along, made a lot of great trade deals, including over 200 planes from Boeing with a promise of 750 planes, which will be by far the largest order ever if they do a good job with the 200, which I'm sure they will. And that's General Electric also, the engines. So they're buying General Electric Engines. So it's approximately, 400, 450 engines."

Greer told reporter Annmarie Hordern that in addition to the previous soybean deal of 25 metric tons annually over the next three years, he expects an agreement from China to buy other agricultural products over the next three years. He characterized the amount as "double-digit billion purchases" annually.

He also noted that China renewed registrations for beef exporters that had been allowed to lapse. "So we're already seeing them start to fulfill some of their promises."

Trump said on Air Force One, "President Xi and I agree on many things, and we agree very much on trade. We're going to be doing a lot of trading. Our farmers are going to be taking in... I mean our farmers are going to be very happy with the deal we made."

Hordern asked Greer if the trade truce between the U.S. and China would be extended past October as a result of this meeting. Greer said that remains to be seen, but that if it continues to work out well, including receiving rare earths and selling the goods they want to sell to China, "we're trying to manage differences rather than escalate them."

She said that Bloomberg hears that for some firms, China is delaying rare earth export licenses, and asked if U.S. officials brought it up in Beijing.

"We do discuss this. We discuss this at all levels," he said, and he acknowledged that while sometimes they drag their feet, the U.S. has "to go and make our point." He said recent Chinese shipments of rare earths came after advocacy from the U.S. "I would give them a passing grade on this."

He dismissed her question on if China would perceive it as escalation if the U.S. imposes higher tariffs under Section 301 after the current investigations are finished.

Former USTR career negotiator Wendy Cutler, who specialized in Asian negotiations, said on a webinar convened by the Washington International Trade Association on the summit that other countries do welcome stabilization in the U.S.-China trade relationship, but they're afraid that they will face higher Section 301 tariffs than China will in the next round, because China and the U.S. have discovered they have mutually assured destruction from the trade war last year, and China would take countermeasures if the U.S. hikes tariffs for overcapacity or forced labor. Even with the first round of Section 301 tariffs on China remaining, the difference in tariffs may not be large enough for Southeast Asian economies or South Asian countries to have a cost advantage.

Greer also said in the interview that he can't say if China's rate would be what it was before the Supreme Court struck down the International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs.

"We'll release the findings of these investigations within the next several weeks, and we'll propose action if we think we need to take action," he said, and then people will be able to comment on tariff recommendations, if tariff hikes are proposed.

Hordern asked Greer to respond to the fact that China is passing laws that are burdensome to companies that are trying to comply with U.S. laws.

"We have raised this with our counterparts. The Chinese in the past couple of weeks put into place supply chain rules, that when I read them, it looks to me like they're saying if you're trying to reshuffle your supply chain or get closer to the United States or something like that, they might punish you," Greer said. He said he's quite concerned about it.

He said the current truce doesn't "solve every problem in the relationship." He said that's why the Board of Trade concept is useful, because it would allow China and the U.S. to be constructive on trade "because we know we're going to have differences in these other areas, whether it's export controls or high-tech or critical infrastructure or things like that."

Analysts, who noted that it usually takes several days for fact sheets about summits to be produced, relied on Greer's, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's, and the president's comments to glean what was achieved from the summit in the first hours after it ended.

At the Council on Foreign Relations, geoeconomics fellow Heidi Crebo-Rediker noted that the truce came about because, as the U.S. hiked tariffs to the triple digits and imposed severe export controls last year, China fought back with an export control regime on critical minerals that would have prevented sales of goods that included Chinese processed critical minerals around the globe, and "we almost saw the U.S. and European auto manufacturing came to a halt."

Rare earth magnets aren't just in cars, they're in MRI machines, ear buds, semiconductors, wind turbines and, Crebo-Rediker noted, military hardware.

Because the U.S. has exhausted so much of its missile and defensive missile supply in the Iran war, "we’ve compounded these vulnerabilities, because in our need to replenish these missile systems we are going to have even greater vulnerability in needing to access what is a complete chokehold on some of the most important rare earths -- heavy rare earths and magnets," she said.

She said it's hard to imagine the issue didn't come up, even if it wasn't mentioned in the first-day readouts.

Zongyuan Zoe Liu, a senior fellow in Chinese studies at CFR, agreed that the summit didn't remove the structural risk in rare earths. "I think the summit reduced near-term escalation risk, but it doesn’t really remove the structural risks that matter most to companies and investors -- you know, like tariffs, export controls, technology restrictions... ."

She said companies do need the relationship to be calm, and more predictable.

When asked by International Trade Today about what sectors might be covered in the $30 billion in goods that administration officials say they would like to remove tariffs on, through the Board of Trade, she said she'd hope that active pharmaceutical ingredients and pharma more broadly could be included.

(Many politicians say that Chinese inputs into medicines are a strategic issue, so if USTR agrees, they would be unlikely to be part of the "non-sensitive" category.)

"I think the best thing that we can hope for is the mechanism could allow for the conversation about tariffs and to manage tariffs, to manage trade, despite any other strategic issues in the background," she said. She doubts the tariff relief will go beyond the $30 billion target. "I’m personally very not optimistic about it to even reach half of the number," she said.

On the Chinese side, she said, the purchasing commitments are vague, and she reminded listeners that the $200 billion commitment on purchases in Trump's first-term phase one deal didn't materialize.

At the Center for Strategic and International Studies, China economics expert Scott Kennedy said that the 200 Boeing planes won't even start to be delivered until 2030, and until Chinese airlines make deposits, we won't know if those are real orders. He said that the Board of Trade doesn't sound that different from the Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade that convened for decades between the U.S. and China.

"It’s mostly old wine, new bottles," he said.

He said the fact that the U.S. no longer is pressing China on global imbalances and its industrial policy, and China gets tariff stability and no new export controls on chips, means China gained more than the U.S. did out of the summit.

At CFR, Liu said the fact that nothing much concrete came of the summit doesn't mean it failed. "Nobody expected that this summit is going to resolve anything tangible. And if it means that this summit is going to pick up a series of other working-level, more meaningful dialogues, that’s great."

She said whether the trade truce lasts beyond October may be resolved by September, as Trump invited Xi to come to the U.S. in late September.

At CSIS, former U.S. ambassador to Malaysia Edgard Kagan agreed with Kennedy that the efforts to change China's behavior have subsided, but said that began during the Biden administration, when, he said, the attitude was: "We accept we can’t change China; we’re not going to change China. We can influence it by changing its external environment."

An expert panel convened by WITA also addressed this shift in goals.

Steven Vaughn, who was a general counsel at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative during Trump's first term, and who traveled to China as the USTR negotiated the phase one agreement, acknowledged that eight years ago, U.S. officials tried to get China to live up to commitments it had made as it joined the World Trade Organization.

"At this point, nobody [in Washington] seriously believes that China is interested in a market-based system. They don't want to have a market-based system. They think market-based systems are foolish."

He said China won't decide to change until the excesses of its subsidies and overcapacity start to harm its economy.

He later said that everybody at USTR spent "at least 20 years" talking to other countries and asking them: "'Can we please have a common China policy?' And I think it's obvious that the rest of the world does not want that. What the rest of the world wants is to be able to play the U.S. and China off against each other."

He said now the U.S. is putting up a tariff wall around Chinese imports, and as the hundreds of thousands of cars and solar panels and other goods are exported to other countries, they'll have to decide what to do. "Because we're not doing this anymore."

He said, "We're going to insulate our own economy from China. We will be trading with China less this year than we did last year. We'll be trading with China less in 2027 than we did in 2026."

He said some countries may decide to import these dumped goods, but he said in developed economies, "I think they're going to put up their own barriers. And as they do, that's how you start to build a dynamic ... where China finally starts to feel the heat."

He said he thinks the U.S. will become a sanctuary from China's market distortions, and that will encourage European, Japanese and South Korean companies to sell and invest here.

"Whereas, if you're trying to compete against China in Southeast Asia or Latin America or Africa or the Middle East, that's going to be much harder."