Transcript: NPR's Interview With China's Ambassador To The U.S.
In a wide-ranging interview with Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep, Cui Tiankai, China's ambassador to the U.S., discusses trade and openness between the two countries, better understanding President Trump, China's social credit system.
Steve Inskeep: What is preventing an end to the trade war with the United States, if anything?
Ambassador Cui Tiankai: Well, first, we certainly don't want to have a trade war with the United States or with any other country.
You have one.
Yeah, this is very unfortunate but we want to solve it through negotiation and consultation between the two sides. But in order for the negotiation, the consultation to succeed, we do need goodwill and good faith from both sides.
Are you seeing goodwill or good faith from the United States?
Well, to tell you the truth, not sufficiently.
What is the evidence of that?
Well, for instance, the U.S. position keeps changing all the time so we don't know exactly what the U.S. would want as priorities. And number two, I think there's been some attempt on the U.S. side to force something like, the U.S. will get 100 percent and China will get zero. I don't think this is fair. I don't think this is possible. We are ready to make a deal. We are ready to make some compromise, but it needs the goodwill from both sides.
Ambassador, you used the word priorities. I'm reminded that a few months ago the U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin went to China for some negotiations and it was said that the United States made a very wide range of demands that were rejected out of hand by China. Is that what you mean by priorities, that you want the United States to pick a few items rather than demanding every complaint be fixed at once?
Well, actually in the last few months there have been contacts between the two governments and from the U.S. side, not only the treasury secretary but the secretary of commerce, USTR and others also went to China and we also have very senior people come here.
Sure.
And there's been a lot of discussion in many areas. And we offered to reduce the trade deficit of the United States, for instance. And we also presented a very good proposal to the U.S. side about the further reform and opening up in China, some of the so-called structural issues. We are ready to work on the issues. Then I think more than once we had some tentative agreement between the two working teams. Then just overnight the tentative agreement was rejected and the demand from U.S. changed. So this is very confusing, and this is making things very difficult.
You must try to calculate what happened there. Do you believe that U.S. negotiators went back to the president and he was not
