Any US-China trade agreement could provide temporary relief to bilateral tensions but won’t change the trajectory of the world fragmenting into separate blocs, a former top US trade official said.

“A US-China deal, whatever it is ... will be at best setting a tactical floor for the moment,” said Charlene Barshefsky, who was the United States Trade Representative in the 1990s under former President Bill Clinton. “Strategically, it will not impact, I don’t believe, either the direction that China is going in or the direction the US is going in,” she said at the Bund Summit in Shanghai on Saturday.

Barshefsky negotiated the terms of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization more than two decades ago. She said she now expects an “organic evolution” in which the world becomes divided

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