- Li Chenggang replaces veteran trade Tsar Wang Shouwen.
- Wang had been China’s main commercial negotiator since 2022.
- The United States insists that China should make the first movement in any commercial agreement.
On Wednesday, China unexpectedly appointed a new commercial negotiator code in any conversation to resolve the growing tariff war with the United States, replacing the commercial veteran Wang Shouwen with its envoy to the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Li Chenggang, 58, former assistant trade minister during the first administration of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, takes over Wang, 59, said the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security in a statement.
It was not clear if Wang, who assumed the role NO 2 in the Ministry of Commerce in 2022, had assumed one position elsewhere. His name was no longer in the Ministry’s leadership team, according to the Ministry’s website until Wednesday.
The Ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters Request for comments on the change, which was not explained in the Declaration of the Ministry of Human Resources.
Wang was considered a hard negotiator and had faced American officials in previous meetings, said a source in the foreign business community of Beijing.
“It’s a bulldog, very intense,” said the source, who declined to be named.
The change within the maximum leadership in the Ministry of Commerce occurs when Beijing seeks a hard line posture in an intensifier commercial war with Washington triggered by Trump’s pronounced tariffs on the items imported from China.
The abrupt change also took place in the middle of the tour of President Xi Jinping for Southeast Asia to consolidate economic and commercial ties with nearby neighbors amid the confrontation with the United States.
The Minister of Commerce, Wang Wentao, was among the senior officials who flanked XI during his visit to Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia this week.
Alfredo Montufar-Helu, main advisor to the Chinese center of the Conference Board, said the change was “very abruptly and potentially harmful” given the speed with which commercial tensions had already intensified the light of Wang’s experience negotiating with the US. UU. From the first Trump administration.
“We can only speculate why this happened at this precise moment, but it could be that, in the opinion of China’s main leadership, given the way the tensions have continued to increase, they need someone else to break the impasse in which both countries are found and finally begin to negotiate,” he said.
Unlike several other nations that have responded to Trump’s plans for punitive tariffs when searching for bilateral agreements with Washington, Beijing has increased its taxes on the assets of the United States. UU. In response and has not sought conversations, which, according to him, can only be done based on mutual respect and equality.
Washington said Tuesday that Trump was open to making a commercial agreement with China, but Beijing should make the first movement, insisting that China needed “our money.”
‘Rate shocks’
At an WTO meeting in February in Geneva, LI criticized the United States to arbitrarily impose tariffs on its commercial partners, including China, warning that such movements have caused “tariff clashes” to the world.
“The unilateralist approach to the USA. UU. Bladely violates the WTO rules, exacerbates economic uncertainty, interrupts global trade and can even subvert the multilateral trade system based on rules. China firmly opposes this and urges the United States to abolish its unfair practices,” he said.
Li, who has done several key works in the Ministry of Commerce, as in the departments that supervise the treaties and law and fair trade, has academic history at the Elite Beijing University and the University of Hamburg of Germany.
“Judging by its CV, Li is a typical Chinese technocrat with extensive experience in commercial problems in the Ministry of Commerce, as well as in WTO,” said Alfred Wu, associate professor at the National University of Singapore.
“It looks like a routine promotion with nothing abnormal, but now it is obviously a sensitive period due to US-China tensions.”
On March 31, Li attended a forum of Chinese private entrepreneurs as a “leader” of the Ministry of Commerce, according to a reading of the state media, one of the first official indications of an imminent movement to a new role.
