China is not likely to have a trade war with the US this year, though 2018 is harder to predict, according to former Chinese vice minister of commerce Wei Jianguo (魏建國), who is now a top official at a Beijing-based think tank.
The world’s largest trading nation hopes dialog will help ease tensions and aims to make progress on agreements before US President Donald Trump visits the country, Wei told reporters in Beijing yesterday.
Wei is vice chairman of the China Center for International Economic Exchanges.
The two nations appear to be making progress toward announcing a series of agreements in a 100-day review designed to clear a backlog of trade and investment issues.
Trump has eased off threats since meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Florida after taking office.
Trump backtracked on his pledges to slap tariffs on Chinese goods after Xi persuaded him that he could help on North Korea. US officials have warned that if China does not deliver, tensions may resurface in the relationship.
Issues that make the trade relationship unpredictable beyond this year include the path of US Federal Reserve rate increases, rising protectionism, Brexit and global growth, Wei said.
A former US official also has expressed doubts about durability of the detente.
Jake Sullivan, a former national security adviser to former US vice president Joe Biden, wrote in an editorial in the Australian Financial Review on Friday last week that the truce was unlikely to hold. Trump, he said, was likely to realize that Xi’s China will not deliver on North Korea pledges.
China should work to reduce the risk of trade friction by continuing communication with the US, Wei said.
Negotiations like the 100-day trade plan are necessary, but more importantly, both sides should build a rapport to solve problems, he said.
Wei said further opening-up in the financial sector and capital account are difficult for China, but that might change in two or three years.
Bilateral economic talks have had long-standing woes, said Zhao Jinping (趙晉平), senior researcher at the Development Research Center of China’s State Council.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS