China hands out olive branch via Apple, Facebook and Tesla ahead of Trump’s Asia visit
Xi spoke to business advisers of Tsinghua University’s business school, including Apple’s CEO Tim Cook and Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Xi Jinping, a week into his second five-year term as China’s president, outlined a vision of openness, mutually beneficial cooperation and delicate diplomacy with the outside world, choosing to sound his thoughts out at a gathering of foreign business advisers in the country’s most prestigious university.
“China’s development offers opportunities for the world,” Xi said, according to a transcript by state news agency Xinhua. China’s economic reform is not a zero-sum game of “winners and losers, but about creating win-win situations through cooperation,” he said.
The Chinese president’s message was delivered to an audience that included Americans that make up the who’s who of US business and industry. Specifically, Xi had in his mind Donald Trump, whose administration refused on Monday to qualify China as a market economy, taking to scold America’s second-biggest trading partner days before the US president is due for his first visit to China since taking office.
“I am looking forward to President Trump’s upcoming visit to China,” Xi said. China is willing to work with the US to “look after each other’s interests and concerns and to properly solve disputes and contradictions,” the Chinese president said, striking a different tone to the US Commerce Department memo that argued for disqualifying China. “We have an optimistic attitude toward the prospects for China-US relations,” he said.
Much is at stake for Trump’s China trip, as the US ran a US$347 billion trade deficit with China last year. It’s a widening gap that generations of US presidents since the 1980s have sought to close. Trump had boasted on the presidential campaign trail of his ability to get a better deal out of trade negotiations with China, and had promised to bring American jobs home and close its trade gap.
The US Commerce Department memo, taken in conjunction with US investigations into Chinese aluminium foil exports, reinforces the argument that China doesn’t yet qualify to be regarded as a market economy in the adjudication of trade disputes and dumping cases. Under World Trade Organisation rules, countries that don’t regard China as “market economies” are entitled to levy higher tariffs on Chinese exports.
