President Xi Jinping of China plans to present President Trump with a set of terms he wants the U.S. to meet before Beijing is ready to settle a market-rattling trade confrontation, raising questions of whether the two leaders will agree to relaunch talks.
Among the preconditions for a trade agreement, Chinese officials with knowledge of the plan said, Beijing is insisting the U.S. remove its ban on the sale of U.S. technology to Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies Co. Beijing also wants the U.S. to lift all punitive tariffs and drop efforts to get China to buy even more U.S. exports than Beijing said it would when the two leaders last met in December.
The U.S. chief trade negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, and his Chinese counterpart, Liu He, talked by telephone this week on ways to get the talks back on track and expect to meet in person in advance of the presidents’ Saturday lunch meeting after a Group of 20 summit in Osaka, people familiar with the discussions said. It is far from clear what the two will manage—and whether their bosses will approve their work.
