REMARKS BY PRESIDENT TRUMP
IN PRESS CONFERENCE
Imperial Hotel Osaka
Osaka, Japan
3:51 P.M. JST
So, with that, I just want to say that these meetings have been great. The one that I guess most people are interested in is China. We had a great meeting. President Xi. And we’ve known each for as long as I’m President. And many of you were at the event in China a year ago, when — I’ve never seen anything like it. The — it was beautiful. We talked about it; we dinner last night, President Xi and a number of us. And it was something really incredible, in Beijing. The red carpet was rolled out for all of us — for this country, for our country.
And we had a great meeting, and we will be continuing to negotiate. And I promised that, for at least the time being, we’re not going to be lifting tariffs on China. We won’t be adding an additional tremendous amount of — we have, I guess, $350 billion left, which could be taxed or it could be tariffed. And we’re not doing that. We’re going to work with China on where we left off, to see if we can make a deal.
China is going to start — they’re going to be consulting with us, and they’re going to start spending money, even during the negotiation, to our farmers, our great farmers in the Midwest. I call them the “great patriots” because that’s what they are. They’re patriots. And China is going to be buying a tremendous amount of food and agricultural product, and they’re going to start that very soon, almost immediately. We’re going to give them lists of things that we’d like them to buy.
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With respect to China, basically we agreed today that we were going to continue the negotiation — which I ended a while back — and we’re going to continue the negotiation. We agreed that I would not be putting tariffs on the $325 billion that I would have the ability to put on if I wanted…
We did discuss numerous other things. We mentioned Huawei. I said, “We’ll have to save that until the very end. We’ll have to see.”
One of the things I will allow, however, is — a lot of people are surprised — we send and we sell to Huawei a tremendous amount of product that goes into the various things that they make. And I said that that’s okay, that we will keep selling that product. These are American companies, John, that make product. And that’s very complex, by the way. Highly scientific.
And in some cases, we’re the ones that do it and we’re the only ones that do it. We’re the only ones with the technology. What we’ve done in Silicon Valley is incredible actually. And nobody has been able to compete with it. And I’ve agreed — and pretty easily — I’ve agreed to allow them to continue to sell that product so American companies will continue. And they were having a problem. The companies were not exactly happy that they couldn’t sell because they had nothing to do with whatever was potentially happening with respect to Huawei. So I did do that.
We talked about education and students. Somebody was saying it was harder for a Chinese students to come in. And that’s something that if it were — if somebody viewed it that way, I don’t. We want to have Chinese students come and use our great schools, our great universities. They’ve been great students and tremendous assets. But we did discuss it. It was brought up as a point, and I said that will be just like anybody else, just like any other nation.
And we’re actually going to a point where, you know, we’re looking that if you graduate from a college, because our great companies — we talk about Silicon Valley and other places — we have a problem in this — in our country that you graduate number one in your class from the best school in the country, and they say you have to leave; we can’t keep them. And we’re going to make it — we’re going to call it the “smart person’s waiver.” But we’re going to make it so that they can not only stay but maybe they have access to green cards. We want to keep these people here.
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But we’re holding on tariffs and they’re going to buy farm product. …
This doesn’t mean there’s going to be a deal, but they would like to make a deal. I can tell you that. And if we could make a deal, it would be a very historic event. You know, we’ve never really had a deal with China. We have — we’ve had tremendous deficits. Tremendous amounts of money was put into China — $500 billion a year. And I mean, you know, not just surplus and deficit. I’m talking about real, hard cash. And it should have never, ever been allowed to have happened for all of our Presidents over the last number of years.