U.S. treasury secretary claims progress in talks with China

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in remarks delivered in Beijing on Monday that she had spent the previous week discussing the U.S.-China relationship with Chinese officials. She said she raised concerns about China’s weak household consumption, overinvestment in business, and government subsidies for certain industries. She said those behaviors threaten workers and businesses in the United States and the rest of the West.

Did she single out any specific industries? She said the Chinese government has invested in and subsidized the electric car, lithium battery, and solar energy industries. She also accused China of flooding the market with artificially cheapened products, threatening the viability of U.S. businesses in those industries. She said her concerns were fueled by a desire to improve relations between the U.S. and China rather than anti-China sentiment.

Did she say what actions she and Chinese officials took to address this? She said that she and her counterpart, Vice Premier He Lifeng, had established economic and financial working groups to address disagreements between the two countries. She also said they had agreed to work together to cut off finances for criminal organizations and that they had agreed to partake in financial technical exchanges between their governments. Those exchanges would provide a platform where financial regulators in both countries could communicate and avoid potential crises.

She insisted that the United States did not seek to decouple its economy from China, even as it sought to diversify its supply chains. She said the United States was committed to economic and national security transparency and sought to eliminate any surprises between Washington and Beijing. She also noted that the U.S. government would welcome similar transparency from China.

Dig deeper: Listen to Myrna Brown’s discussion with Dean Cheng, senior advisor to the China program of the U.S. Institute of Peace, on The World and Everything in It podcast about new Hong Kong legislation suppressing free speech.