As Trump Moves to End Trade War With China, Business Asks: Was It Worth It?

Author: Ana Swanson and Jim Tankersley / Source: New York Times

Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The pain of President Trump’s trade war with China may soon be over, but American businesses and farmers are left wondering whether it was worth the trouble.

Negotiations with the Chinese are continuing, and Mr.

Trump could still secure more concessions to balance out a trading relationship he has long criticized as unfair. But details of the emerging deal paint a familiar picture of Beijing making vague promises to change its economic practices that could be easy to delay and difficult to enforce.

While previous administrations have tried to cajole China into changing its behavior, Mr. Trump has used a blunt instrument: deploying punishing tariffs to win concessions. That has given the United States a remarkable amount of leverage, but it has also taken a heavy toll on farmers, automakers, manufacturers and other businesses with exposure to China. Those businesses have faced higher costs, reduced access to the Chinese market and retaliation, including tariffs on American goods. Some farmers have permanently lost customers and contracts in China, while the profits — and share prices — of multinational businesses have taken a significant hit.

Now, with the United States poised to roll back most of its tariffs as the two countries close in on a final agreement, the question is whether the costs of Mr. Trump’s deal-making outweigh the benefits.

“Can we go back to the pretariff days? Yes, we can,” said Derek Scissors, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Have we moved the bar since the beginning of the Trump administration? The answer is no.”

Over the past several weeks, American and Chinese negotiators have been in almost constant contact over phone and video conferencing to hammer out the terms of a deal. China has agreed to drop the retaliatory tariffs it imposed to counter Mr. Trump’s levies on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods and to provide greater access to its markets for cars, beef, chemicals and other products.

Beijing has pledged to have Chinese companies purchase hundreds of billions of dollars worth of liquefied natural gas, soybeans and other goods over a number of years to appease Mr. Trump’s focus on the bilateral trade deficit. China is also rewriting some of its laws and regulations to better protect foreign intellectual property, ban the forced transfer of foreign technology to Chinese business partners and codify equal treatment of foreign companies.

In return, China wants Mr. Trump to drop all the tariffs he imposed over the past year, which have begun to hamper the Chinese economy. While any final decision will fall to the president, people familiar with the negotiations say the United States is willing to scrap tariffs on at least $200 billion worth of goods, if not all.

The tariff détente would help large and small companies that have struggled under the weight of 10 percent and 25 percent levies, but the trade war has already come at a cost. Several recent studies have shown modest but growing damage to the United States economy from the trade war, including the retaliatory tariffs other countries have leveled against American exports.

And contrary to Mr. Trump’s claim that the Chinese are paying the tariffs, several studies show they are being passed on to American consumers in the form of higher prices on imported goods.

Mr. Trump’s tariffs “were almost completely passed through into U.S. domestic prices,” the economists Mary Amiti of the…

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