It appears President Trump's remarks about the lack of progress made by China in pressuring North Korea has worked. Reuters reports that CNPC - the main supplier of diesel and gasoline to North Korea - has halted sales, reportedly because the buyers could not pay.
A week after the President said that "while I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!"
Two weeks after Trump's ominous "China "tried and failed" to contain North Korea tweet, the US president appears to be getting closer to that default condition in US-China relations which many had anticipated from day one: a not particularly cooperative one. Here's Reuters:
Authored by YaleGlobal Online via OilPrice.com,
China’s Belt and Road Forum, hosted with great fanfare, signals the priority of this flagship connectivity initiative while also underlining its credentials as the new “shaper” of global trends and norms. Exhorting all countries to participate, Chinese President Xi Jinping suggested that “what we hope to create is a big family of harmonious co-existence.”
After terse public exchanges this week, each proclaiming the other is not working hard enough on 'solving' the Kim Jong Un 'situation', Chinese state media said on Saturday, reporting the results of high level talks in Washington this week, that China and the United States agreed that efforts to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula should be "complete, verifiable and irreversible."
Trump's trade tsar, Robert Lighthizer, aka the US Trade Representative speaking before Congress on Wednesday, fired a warning shot at both Beijing and the World Trade Organization, warning that any decision to label China a “market economy” would have “cataclysmic” consequences for the body which has governed over international trade for decades.