As Bloomberg recaps this morning, “negotiations have long been stuck over U.S. demands for deep structural reforms such as stopping forced technology transfers, enforcing intellectual property rights and ending state subsidies for strategic industries – all of which China sees as an American strategy to thwart its rise as a global power.” It is on these most thorny of issues that there was no real progress during the Trump-Xi dinner.
In fact, as Michael Every, head of Asia financial markets at Rabobank said overnight, “I will eat my hat if this means anything substantive” as “neither side is fully ready for the war, but neither side will budge.”
