"Pardon me if I don't pop champagne"

The Phase One - or whatever it is - trade agreement between the Trump administration and China is rather underwhelming:

US officials announced a truce in the trade war with China with much fanfare, but economists and trade experts call it largely a victory for Beijing.

After a dispute that raged for close to two years, with several fumbled efforts at a resolution, the US agreed to cancel planned tariffs and rollback others immediately, without a similar commitment from China to lift tariffs it imposed on the US.

"Pardon me if I don't pop champagne, but aside from a cessation of continued escalation, there is not much worth cheering," leading China expert Scott Kennedy said in an analysis of the agreement.

"The costs have been substantial and far reaching, the benefits narrow and ephemeral."

After all our gyrations, China's still gonna be China:

. . . trade economist Mary Lovely said the deal could only be viewed as a "partial win" which "didn't move the needle very much."
"We were kind of on a brink, and we saw the negotiators reach a deal that pulled us back, and I think that is important," she said of the news Trump canceled the 15 percent tariffs on electronics that were due to hit Sunday.
But the gains in the deal do not compensate for the damage to US farmers and businesses, she told reporters.
"President Trump is desperately trying to get back to where the economy was 18 months ago," before taking this "unilateral, brute force approach," Lovely said.

Farmers in particular are still in limbo:

Donald Trump says China will spend $50 billion a year for U.S. farm products as part of a “phase one” trade deal between the countries. But doubts are surfacing whether that’s even possible, bolstered by China’s reluctance to confirm the figure.

While the president expressed confidence China would meet the goal “pretty soon,” doing so would require a huge jump in China’s imports, potentially stretching its capacity to absorb the products. Trump’s trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, laid out some numbers to reporters, but declined to get very specific.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials repeatedly didn’t answer questions on the exact size of their commitment in a briefing Friday.

“I have been very skeptical,” said Joseph Glauber, a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “How would they do it?”

Look, it's been clear for some time now that China has not lived up to that brief moment of promise when, under Deng Xiaoping, it embarked on a program of economic reform. On the surface, it looks like an entirely different country than it did, say, during the Great Leap Forward, or the Cultural Revolution. Its cities are teeming with sharp young go-getters, many educated in Western universities. Joint ventures with US firms abound. But, actually, lately, it has begun to not look so different after all, what with the implementation of a "social credit" system, the clear intention to impose a heavy hand in Hong Kong, and the re-education camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang. But the abrupt distorting the market value of goods and services, and the uncertainty it introduces into areas such as agriculture and manufacturing caused by tariffs is not the way to begin the process of extricating ourselves and taking our business elsewhere.