But years of broken Chinese promises explain why the president is preparing to take the toughest - and potentially most disruptive - US trade actions against China in a generation, according to an official with the US trade representative's office.
"China uses these dialogues to delay and run out the clock and make you ask for things they already said they were going to do," the official said. "The administration has not been satisfied with the type of responses we've been getting from China."
The official requested anonymity in order to provide context for the president's announcement of new steps designed to punish China for violating US intellectual property rights by stealing trade secrets or forcing companies to surrender them in return for market access.
Administration officials are bracing for a firm Chinese response to any action. Chinese President Xi Jinping, fresh from eliminating term limits on his rule, presides over a government that already has drawn up lists of potential American products for retaliation in a trade war.
"China is not going to want to come to the negotiating table from a position of weakness," said Claire Reade, former USTR chief counsel for China trade enforcement. "They've been thinking of this since Trump was elected."
In testimony Wednesday before the House Ways and Means Committee, Robert Lighthizer, the US trade representative, called China's intellectual property rights practices "an assault" on American high-technology industries.
After the hurried rollout earlier this month of new tariffs on imported steel and aluminium, the Trump administration is portraying the coming China moves as the result of a deliberative inter-agency process.
The president opted for new trade barriers after sounding out officials in Beijing about a potential deal, the official said.
Starting with Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Trump's Mar-a-Lago Florida retreat last spring, US and Chinese officials met for talks aimed at resolving lingering trade differences.
"There's very little evidence that China's actual behaviour was changing for the better," the official said.
The president sees the record US$375 billion (NZ$518 billion deficit in goods trade with China as evidence that US businesses are being unfairly treated. Many economists say that bilateral trade scores reflect broader economic forces, including Americans' propensity to buy imported goods rather than save.
When last year's talks made little headway, Trump in August ordered Lighthizer to investigate whether China was discriminating against US companies with its intellectual property practices.
The administration says that US companies face pressure to hand over technology to their Chinese partners to gain needed government permits and licenses. Chinese hackers also have penetrated computer networks of companies such as US Steel, making off with confidential business plans. And Chinese investors, including state-backed funds, have been encouraged by their government to acquire US intellectual property by buying Silicon Valley companies, officials said.
Chinese companies often register US trademarks as their own in China and effectively hold out for "ransom" from the legitimate owner, according to a January report from Lighthizer's office.
U.S. companies also complained of only "relatively modest progress made by China over the last several years in reducing" the use of pirated software and a continuing problem with trade secret theft from their China-based research centres, the report added.
