Why China commits to buy 10 million tons of U.S. soybeans?

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China and the U.S. are inching closer to resolving their bitter trade differences. The high-level Chinese negotiating team, which has been in talks in Washington, will extend its stay through the weekend.

The two sides have discussed many tense issues, including intellectual property rights, technology transfer, currency exchange rates, crop production and U.S. banks' entry into China, of which the soybean issue stands out.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said on Twitter Friday that China is committed to buying an additional 10 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans. Some may deem it is a major compromise made by China to cheer the U.S., which obviously goes against the facts.

The gap in China's soybean market is rather huge -- around 90 percent of its soybeans are imported from the international market. These imported soybeans are mostly used in oil expression and feed processing, while their domestic counterparts mainly offer products like bean sprout and bean curd.

In a nutshell, owing to the huge demand gap and totally different specific uses, the amount of imported soybeans has no close bearing on domestic production.

In 2017, China imported a total of 95.53 million tons of soybeans, of which 32.58 million tons came from the U.S., and 50.93 million tons were imported from Brazil.

In 2018, China's soybean imports amounted to 88.031 million tons, a decrease of 7.9 percent from a year earlier, among which imports from the U.S. stood at 16.64 million tons, down 49.4 year on year and accounting for 18.9 percent of China's total. Imports from Brazil were 66.82 million tons, up 29.8 percent year on year and constituting 75.1 percent of the country's soybean imports.

It can be seen that soybean imports from the U.S. cannot be entirely replaced at the current stage. The second largest economy did turn to Brazil for more purchases of the crop, but the latter is charging more since the trade friction was set in motion.

The U.S. acts as the world's top soybean producer, with the country's output standing at about 100 million tons. Nearly half of U.S. soybean yields are exported every year due to a relatively saturated domestic market.

After Trump provoked the tit-for-tat trade war last year, China staunchly fought back by a host of measures including cutting off soybean imports from the U.S., as a result of which the U.S. farmers bore the brunt and left their soybeans going bad in the soil.

Republicans lost their control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections last November, and one of the important reasons is the defection of several agricultural states.