Mubasher: The US-China trade war seems to move close to an end as the world’s two largest economies are inching toward a broad deal.

Under the potential deal, China will continue to run large trade surpluses with the US as it will never accept Washington-imposed reforms of its trade and industry, CNBC reported on Monday.

Over the course of negotiations, US President Donald Trump was at pains to further push China for “free, fair and reciprocal” trade.

To this end, Trump just had to advise China to “limit, immediately and irrevocably, its exports to the US to the amount of its purchases from America,” CNBC said.

China is always concerned about this sort of reciprocal trading, so Beijing led, among US's European friends and allies, to a strong and vocal global advocacy against Trump's trade policies, it added.

During the first 11 months of 2018, US exports to China dropped to $111.16 billion, making up only 7.2% of total American sales abroad, while China’s exports to US markets registered a whopping $493.49 billion.

In the same vein, Washington seeks to impose on China enforceable structural reforms as China’s readiness to reduce the bilateral trade imbalance won't be enough, according to Trump’s advisors.

US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has been frequently repeated that without this move, China's destabilising trade surpluses would be back in no time.

The enforceable structural reforms the US wants China to carry out include the protection of intellectual property, the outlawing of forced technology transfers and the cessation of illegal, market-distorting industry subsidies, CNBC said.

China denies any of those violations and refuses the claim that its economic and industrial revival was based on decades-long of intellectual property theft and coerced technology transfers.

One of the major blockages in last week’s trade negotiations in Beijing was that China accepted to make its industry subsidies compliant with the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) relevant