Mubasher: Both US and Chinese officials expressed their optimism regarding the trade talks between the world’s two biggest economies in Beijing this week, while both sides would resume their negotiations in the next week.

This came despite the absence of indication that Washington and Beijing had managed to broker a resolution to their prolonged trade conflict.

Chinese President Xi Jinping lauded the US cooperation and struck an upbeat tone about the prospects of an end to the trade conflict.

“The consultations between the two teams have made important progress,” President Xi said, noting the talks would carry on next week in Washington.

Earlier this week, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin visited Beijing and met the Chinese president at the end of the talks.

“Cooperation serves the interests of the two sides and conflict can only hurt both,” Xi said.

In addition, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin said on Twitter that the bilateral trade talks were “productive.”  

A statement from the White House said that the negotiations between both sides yielded “progress, […] but much work remains.”

The talks addressed “structural issues, including forced technology transfer, intellectual property rights, cyber theft, agriculture services, non-tariff barriers and currency,” the White House statement said, announcing that next week’s talks in Washington would be at the ministerial level.

US and Chinese negotiators reportedly made some progress toward a memorandum of understanding aimed at defusing the countries’ trade tensions, according to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

The memorandum could be a framework for an agreement that Trump and Xi might later finalise at a summit, the WSJ reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Both sides are scrambling to hammer out a deal ahead of the 1 March deadline set by the Trump administration for a “comprehensive” agreement to fix the trade relations between the two countries.

The US president threatened to double tariffs against $200 billion in Chinese imports, should both sides fail to ink a deal.