China expressed its strongest support so far Tuesday for the denuclearization deal between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, although concerns are mounting that Mr. Trump’s aggressive tariffs on Chinese goods could lead Beijing to be less cooperative in the U.S.-led push to get Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons arsenal.
China, which has positioned itself as the go-to partner in Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign against North Korea, hopes to exploit its influence over Pyongyang as leverage to try to gain tariff concessions from Mr. Trump — amid few signs that the president and his hawkish trade advisers are ready to back down.
The two issues until now have developed along separate tracks, with the president signaling as recently as Monday night his willingness to escalate the trade battle with China. Beijing has resisted — publicly at least — any statements linking the two issues.
Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Mr. Kim in Beijing on Tuesday for their first face-to-face talks since the June 12 Singapore summit. He told the North Korean leader that he hopes Pyongyang and Washington “will implement well the outcomes achieved at the summit.”
In addition to a joint statement at the summit that broadly expressed the North’s commitment to “work toward” denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, Mr. Trump afterward agreed to suspend U.S. military exercises with South Korea in what was widely seen as a major win for Pyongyang and its chief allies, China and Russia.
In a further sign of the erosion of decades of hostility, U.S. officials told The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity Monday evening that the American military command in South Korea will soon receive from North Korea the remains of more than 200 service members from the Korean War.
The ceremony’s timing remained uncertain, though, as did the precise number of remains, their identities and even whether they were Americans or from allied nations.
Appearing at the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing on Tuesday, Mr. Xi hailed the summit as an “important step toward the political solution of the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue.”
He made the comments just hours after Mr. Trump escalated his trade feud with China with a threat to impose tariffs of 10 percent on another $200 billion worth of Chinese goods in retaliation for Beijing’s disputed intellectual property practices and its aggressive response to previous U.S. tariffs, a move Chinese officials said they were willing to match.
Beijing and Washington have held three rounds of high-level trade talks since early May but have failed to address Mr. Trump’s impatience to reduce a U.S. trade deficit that hit $376 billion last year.
Mr. Trump last week announced plans for tariffs on $50 billion worth of imports from China in the technology sector, a move aimed at what he called “bringing balance to our trade relationship.”
China quickly retaliated with tariffs on some $50 billion worth of American goods, including cars, tobacco and beef.
The trade tensions have sent shock waves across global stock markets. The Dow Jones industrial average fell for a sixth day in a row Tuesday, losing roughly 1.1 percent, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index sank 2.8 percent, its biggest decline since February, and Germany’s DAX lost 1.2 percent.
“With each escalation, you get more worried that things will get out of hand,” Bob Phillips, managing principal at Spectrum Management Group, told the financial news network CNBC. “I know Trump wants to do something to help out blue-collar workers, but … each time you ratchet this up, China has to come out strong.”
Collapsing sanctions?
Analysts are watching closely to see if China’s anger over the tariffs will affect its willingness to continue backing the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign against North Korea until Pyongyang fully abandons its nuclear weapons programs.
Washington has long pressed China, Mr. Kim’s main economic and strategic ally, to use its influence to compel North Korea into the negotiations. Many analysts credited Beijing’s implementation over the past year of biting U.N. sanctions with driving Pyongyang to the bargaining table.
But concerns are running high that China and Russia are poised to seize on Mr. Trump’s public assertion after meeting Mr. Kim last week that there is now “no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea” as justification to begin reducing their support for U.S.-led sanctions against Pyongyang.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Tuesday that Beijing supported Russia’s calls last week for an end to unilateral sanctions on North Korea — sanctions imposed by individual countries outside of the U.N.-organized pressure campaign.
“China always stands against the so-called unilateral sanctions outside the Security Council framework,” Mr. Geng said. “This position is very clear, and we believe sanctions themselves are not the end.”
North Korean coal
With China’s steel industry powered in part by North Korean coal imports, Mr. Kim is believed to be pushing behind the scenes on Beijing to give up its support for sanctions blocking such imports.
Some analysts contend that the rising trade frictions between China and the U.S. will make Beijing less inclined to continue using its influence over North Korea to help the U.S. achieve its objectives of denuclearization.
“The potential comprehensive trade war will make the cooperation between China and U.S. in North Korea’s nuclear issue more complicated,” Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor at Renmin University’s School of International Studies in Beijing, told The Associated Press. “There will be a big question mark over whether China and the U.S. will continue this cooperation.”
But others argue that the Trump administration’s hard line on China might be damaging for Pyongyang because the tariffs could trigger a shrinkage of the Chinese steel industry and reduce Beijing’s appetite for North Korean coal.
So far, Chinese officials have avoided explicitly linking the North Korea crisis and U.S. tariff threats. An editorial in China Daily, Beijing’s state-run English-language newspaper, focused Tuesday on the economic impact of Mr. Trump’s threat, claiming his actions are “self-harming the U.S.”
The Chinese Commerce Ministry called the tariff threat an “act of extreme pressure and blackmail” and asserted that, “if the U.S. becomes irrational and issues this list, China will have no choice but to adopt strong countermeasures of the same amount and quality.”
Some China watchers say Mr. Xi will have a hard time domestically if he is seen to be knuckling under to Mr. Trump’s trade offensive, and may be calculating that he could be in power far longer than his American counterpart.
“Not only the Chinese government, but also the whole Chinese society cannot accept the U.S. trying to blackmail China,” the state-controlled Global Times newspaper said in an editorial Tuesday. “We cannot accept that the U.S. unilaterally define China-U.S. relations in violation of basic international norms, nor can we allow it to establish trade hegemony overriding the current international trading system and interests of other nations.”
Mr. Trump, however, has raised the specter of a connection between trade and North Korea by publicly suggesting that China may be using its influence over North Korea to gain leverage over the White House.
Mr. Trump noted on May 17 that North Korea shifted suddenly back toward hostile posturing against Washington after Mr. Kim made an unexpected visit to Beijing.
“I think things changed a little bit when they met with China,” said the president, who noted in the same breath that his administration was engaged in major trade talks with the Chinese and that the U.S. “has been ripped off for many, many years by its bad trade deals.”
• S.A. Miller, Dave Boyer and Dan Boylan contributed to this article, which is based in part on wire service reports.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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