China fell more than $200 billion short of its purchase commitments for goods and services in a trade deal that it reached with the United States during the Trump administration, according to a report released Tuesday. The commitment was made in the so-called Phase One deal, in which Beijing promised to purchase an extra $200 billion worth of American exports above its 2017 levels, before a U.S.-China trade war began.
The deal required China to meet the purchase commitments in the two years through the end of 2021. But “China bought only 57 percent of the U.S. exports it had committed,” Chad Bown, an economist of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said in his report, which analyzed final 2021 trade data from the Department of Commerce. Beijing pledged to buy a total of $502.4 billion worth of U.S. exports over the two years but effectively purchased only $288.8 billion, according to the …
