China unexpectedly miss the new trade trading in the midst of US war war

• Li Chenggang replaces veteran trade of Tsar Wang Shouwen.
• Wang has been China’s leading trading negotiator since 2022.
• The US insists that China should make the first move in any trade agreement.

China on Wednesday unexpectedly appointed a new commercial negotiating key in any talks to resolve the escalating tariff war with the United States, replacing veteran Tsar Wang Shouwen with his envoy to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Li Chenggang, 58, former Minister of Commerce during the first administration of US President Donald Trump, takes over from Wang, 59, said in a statement by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

It was not clear whether Wang, who assumed the role of No. 2 at the Ministry of Commerce in 2022, had taken a position elsewhere. His name was no longer in the ministry’s leadership team, according to the ministry’s website on Wednesday.

The ministry did not respond immediately to a Reuters Request for comments on change, which was not explained to the statement by the Ministry of Human Resources.

Wang was considered a tough negotiator and had clashed with US officials in previous meetings, a source in the foreign business community in Beijing said.

“It’s a bulldog, very intense,” said the source, who refuses to be called.

The shift of the leading leadership to the Ministry of Commerce comes to Beijing, seeking a harsh stance on an intensive trade war with Washington caused by Trump’s abrupt invoices into items imported from China.

The sudden change was also made in the middle of President Xi Jinping’s tour in Southeast Asia to consolidate economic and commercial ties with close neighbors in the midst of the US stop.

Trade Minister Wang Wentao was between senior officials who surround XI during his visit to Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia this week.

Alfredo Montufar-Helu, a senior adviser to the Court of China, said the change was “very abrupt and potentially annoying”, given how quickly the tensions of trade had escalated and in the light of Wang’s experience negotiated by the US.

“We can only think about why this has happened at this precise moment, but it may be that in the view of China’s leading leadership, given the way tensions continued to escalate, they need someone else to break the impasse in which both countries are and finally start.”

Unlike many other nations that have responded to Trump’s plans for punitive invoices, searching for bilateral agreements with Washington, Beijing has set its contributions to US goods in response and has not requested conversations, which says that they can only be carried out.

Washington said Tuesday that Trump was open to make a trade agreement with China, but Beijing would have to make the first move, insisting that China needed “our money”.

‘Invoices’

At a February WTO meeting in Geneva, Lee hit the US for arbitrary imposing invoices on its commercial partners, including China, warning that such moves have caused the world “invoicing vibration”.

“The US unilateral approach is blacked out in the WTO rules, exacerbates economic uncertainty, disrupts global trade and can even undermine the rules -based multilateral trade system.

Lee, who held several basic jobs in the Ministry of Commerce, such as in the departments that oversee the conditions and law and fair trade, has an academic background at Elite Peking University and the University of Hamburg, Germany.

“Judging from his resume, Li is a typical Chinese technocrat with extensive experience in commercial issues at the Ministry of Commerce as well as in the WTO,” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Singapore National University.

“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, Lee watched a forum of Chinese private entrepreneurs as a “leader” of the Ministry of Commerce, according to a state reading of the media’s media, one of the first official hints of an impending move in a new role.