Good trade ties vital at state level in US

US states continue to value trade relations with China, despite ongoing tensions at the international level, and they hope tensions will be resolved through negotiations.

"I'm very optimistic on the China-US trade relationship," Cyrus Habib, lieutenant governor of Washington, said in an interview with China Daily as he was attending the Fifth China-US Governors Forum in Lexington, Kentucky, last week.

China is the state of Washington's top trading partner, with more than 20 percent of the state's exports going to China, and around 30 percent of its imports came from China in 2018, according to the US Census Bureau.