Welcome to the 253rd edition of Trade War.
On a visit to Beijing, Montana Senator Steve Daines pushes for a Xi-Trump meeting, but it’s unlikely to happen soon. Xi styles China as open for business, in a speech to American and foreign business executives. And after being stuck in the doldrums, Chinese stocks are gaining traction once again.
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming becomes China’s richest person. And Beijing says no dice to Trump, as he proposes to lower tariffs in exchange for a TikTok deal.
Upset over the Panama ports deal, Chinese authorities order state firms to give the cold shoulder to Li Ka-shing and his family’s companies. China strengthens provisions in Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law. And Trump’s latest auto export tariffs likely to benefit Chinese electric vehicle companies.
Notable/In depth ~
DeepSeek is deployed in ports, cities across China
New report looks at Beijing’s use of economic inducements
Federal government must fund technology argue Young and Pottinger
Xi-Trump meeting may be far off
Following his recent conversations with Chinese officials in Beijing including with Premier Li Qiang, Montana Senator Steve Daines says he hopes a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and China’s leader Xi Jinping will happen before the end of the year.
“There’s a desire from both sides to have the high-level meeting. There’s just isn’t a date yet,” Daines, a close ally of Trump, told Bloomberg News.
“I made it clear that President Trump needs to see China take decisive actions to stop the flow of fentanyl precursors, not to slow down the flow but to stop the flow,” Daines said. The Montana senator worked for Procter & Gamble in China for six years in the 1990s, based in both Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
China claims it has already made significant progress. The U.S. should have “said a big thank you,” rather than imposing tariffs, a Chinese foreign ministry official said earlier this month.
Top U.S. executives from FedEx, Boeing, Cargill, Pfizer, and Qualcomm joined Daines in his meeting with China’s premier on March 23.
“The calendar is working against a meeting,” Dexter Roberts, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Global China Hub and instructor in Chinese politics at the University of Montana said to Bloomberg. “As tariffs ratchet up on both sides, the likelihood of a Xi-Trump meeting only fades.”
“There’s concern that this could escalate into a larger trade war. The United States and China combined account for 43 percent of the world’s GDP . . . So this is a significant moment, not only for our two countries, but frankly globally, because we’re such a big part of the world’s GDP. So I think both sides want to find a path forward here,” Daines said in a separate interview with Semafor. “But we’ve got to get their cooperation, and leadership in not just talking, but taking action.”
“I was there with extensive experience—we had two children born in Hong Kong—in China. And I want to use my experience and relationships I had, and the respect I have in China, to be able to clearly communicate President Trump’s policies. Specifically, the president’s focus on stopping the flow of fentanyl into the United States.”
Xi touts openness to foreign CEOs
In contrast to Trump’s barrage of tariff threats and other moves alienating close trading partners of the U.S., Xi is styling China as open for business, a message he pushed when he met with American and foreign business executives in Beijing on Friday.
At the meeting in the Great Hall of the People, Xi declared China a “favorite destination” for foreign investors, touting its “transparent, steady and predictable policy environment.”
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