WASHINGTON: A bullish President Donald Trump warned China of an even deeper trade war on Wednesday ahead of a G20 summit where he will meet President Xi Jinping, saying China’s remaining imports are “ripe” for tariffs.

Markets are anxiously watching the Trump-Xi meeting, due on Saturday, for a breakthrough in the dispute pitting the world’s two largest economies against each other.

Insisting that a strong negotiating hand means he has no need to give way, Trump did not especially seek to calm those nerves.

“China’s economy is going down the tubes -- they want to make a deal,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business News just hours before taking off for the summit in Osaka, Japan.

Trump has already hit $200 billion of Chinese imports with levies in an effort to force Beijing into intellectual property protection and other reforms of a trading system that Washington says gives China huge unfair advantages.

On Wednesday, the president strongly indicated he was ready to slap tariffs on all remaining Chinese imports — more than $300 billion worth.

“You have another $325 billion that I haven’t taxed yet — it’s ripe for taxing, for putting tariffs on,” he told Fox.

According to Trump, it’s China that’s feeling all the pain.

“What is happening is people are moving out of China. Companies are moving out of China, by the way, some are coming back to the United States because they don’t want to pay the tariff,” he told Fox Business News.

Trump did say that a previous threat to tax this remaining segment at 25pc could be changed to a less harsh 10pc.

The two sides said they were close to a deal before talks broke down in May.

“We were about 90pc of the way there,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told CNBC television, saying he was looking forward to the Trump-Xi talks but stressing there would be no “deal for having the sake of a deal.” “I hope the message that we want to hear is that they want to come back to the table,” Mnuchin said.

Published in Dawn, June 27th, 2019