https://archive.is/FKuhi (reuters)
https://archive.is/MIdNc (afp)
Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng met for about eight hours with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in Geneva in their first face-to-face meeting since the world’s two largest economies heaped tariffs well above 100% on each other’s goods.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday that an 80% tariff on Chinese goods “seems right”, suggesting for the first time a specific alternative to the 145% levies he has imposed on Chinese imports.
Neither side made any statements about the substance of the discussions nor signaled any progress towards reducing crushing tariffs as meetings at the residence of Switzerland’s ambassador to the U.N. concluded at about 8 p.m. local time. (1800 GMT)
The discussions are expected to restart on Sunday in the Swiss city, according to an individual familiar with the talks, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The 80% number is just something that Trump posted on his social media early on Friday morning, before any meeting ever happened.
UPDATE Trump posted on truthsocial, 1 hour ago. He describes the meeting with the phrases “total reset” and “great progress”. I won’t believe this until I hear the perspective from China’s government.
This is all gang of four ultraleft nonsense and vibe-posting, with zero sources, to try to drivie home the long-debunked propaganda that China abandoned the socialist road.
If you’re going to claim that the PRC is a liberal country now, and that the CPC “hasn’t been a marxist party since the 1990s”, then there’s zero point in engaging.
No offense, you NEVER lived in China. You have no idea what China was like in the 1990s, in the 2000s.
Deng’s reform had effectively ended in the 1990s with China experiencing an economic crisis with an unemployment rate never seen before under Mao. By 1998, Zhu Rongji ended the welfare housing program and fully opened up the property market to private capital in China. By 2001, it would join the WTO and stripped the last vestiges of worker’s rights in China.
China returning to its Marxist roots is a very recent phenomenon, with Xi ascending to power in 2013. He had vowed to take on the neoliberals on many occasions, which I fully support. As I said, it seems that the libs are still too powerful in China (especially after sabotaging Zero Covid) and if you have been paying attention at all, Li Qiang, the new Premier, has been running the show for a while now, engaging with business leaders and private capital, vowing to open up China’s capital markets etc.
Again, most Western leftists have zero idea on what they’re talking about when it comes to the pre-2018 history in China. They only know Xi and Deng, but what happened in between, few had any clues at all.