Summary: It’s so much better to do a tv spot on set with the anchor than as a head in a box from a remote studio. Today, I got to talk with Kelly Evans, anchor of CNBC’s The Exchange, about what we can expect from the Mnuchin/Lighthizer meeting in Beijing tomorrow and Friday. Kelly is really smart and a pleasure to work with. You can see a brief video clip of the conversation by clicking here.
As you will see in the video, I am optimistic that the teams have now worked together long enough to understand each other and that they are making progress. I have met with our team and feel that both Mnuchin and Lighthizer have a clear sense of the agenda they want to achieve. The most important issue on the table is intellectual property (IP), not whether to protect it, but how to protect it. As I discuss with Kelly, private property laws in. China a still quite new and the court system for enforcing the rules is not well developed. The think that will make it work is that China’s development plan to move from assembling to design, production, and marketing of branded products will only succeed if they can protect their own IP.
One final point. While our team is meeting with Liu He in Beijing this week, everyone else that matters in the Chinese government (including PBOC Governor Yi Gang) will be at The BOAO Forum. It takes place once each year at a beautiful bird sanctuary in Hainan, a Chineses island-province that dangles between Hong Kong and Vietnam. I have spoken at this extraordinary meeting many times. It is the single most important meeting of the year for Asian governments. (At the last one I attended, we had 15 heads of state in one room and delegations from both Taiwan and North Korea tucked away in the hotel where they weren’t visible to the hordes of press that attend the meetings. I briefed our team on the importance of BOAO and urged them to find a way to be a regular participant. Would have liked to see this week’s trade talks taking place there instead of Beijing.
JR
