Beijing said on Friday that any decision by the United States to arbitrarily decouple from China would not be realistic or wise. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian made the remarks in response to renewed threats by US President Donald Trump to cut ties with Beijing.
Trump has made rebalancing the massive US trade deficit with China a top priority, but relations have steadily worsened.
“It was not Ambassador Lighthizer’s fault [yesterday in Committee] in that perhaps I didn’t make myself clear,” Trump tweeted on Thursday, referring to his trade representative, Robert Lighthizer. “But the US certainly does maintain a policy option, under various conditions, of a complete decoupling from China.”
Lighthizer told a House of Representatives committee on Wednesday he did not see that as viable. “Do I think that you can sit down and decouple the US economy from the Chinese economy?” he said. “No. I think that was a policy option years ago. I don’t think it’s a… reasonable policy option at this point.”