People harvest corn from a field at the Hansen Family Farm in Baxter, Iowa, Oct. 12, 2019.
On Friday (29), White House spokesman Jen Psaki said the Biden administration will review all national security measures by former President Donald Trump (Trump), including the first phase of the U.S.-China trade deal signed in January 2020. On the same day the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that China had made its largest purchase of U.S. corn to date.
At a White House press briefing on Friday, a reporter asked President Biden if he thought the U.S.-China Phase I trade deal was still in effect. Psaki said, “All of the initiatives that were implemented by the previous administration are under review as it relates to our national security measures, so I wouldn’t assume that things will move forward.”
Psaki added that the Biden Administration is focused on “taking a strong position on the U.S.-China relationship, which means coordinating and communicating with our allies and partners on how to work with China.”
Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration’s national security adviser, also said the same day that the U.S. alliance system is the cornerstone of America’s future geopolitical success. To defeat the “Chinese (Communist) model,” he said, the United States must also join forces with allies and partners in democratic countries.
On Jan. 15, 2020, then-President Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He signed the first phase of the trade agreement at the White House. In that agreement, the Chinese Communist Party pledged to purchase large quantities of U.S. goods and services. However, a report released this month by Chad Bown, a trade policy expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, shows that the size of the Chinese Communist Party’s purchases of U.S. goods in 2020 is 42 percent less than the amount it promised in the trade deal.
Separately, Reuters reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Friday that the Chinese Communist Party had purchased the largest amount of U.S. corn to date, as much as 2.108 million tons, to meet a surge in demand for animal feed.
In July 2020, the Chinese Communist Party purchased 1.937 million tons of U.S. corn. Three months later, Reuters cited sources as saying the Chinese Communist government has been seeking to increase corn imports in response to tight domestic supplies caused by flooding and dry weather.
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