- Li Chegggang replaces the Tsar Wang Shouwen veteran.
- Wang was the first Chinese commercial negotiator since 2022.
- The United States insists that China should do the first time in any trade agreement.
On Wednesday, China unexpectedly appointed a new key as a commercial negotiator in all talks to resolve the climbing of the tariff war with the United States, replacing the Tsar Wang Shouwen veteran with its envoy to the World Trade Organization (WCO).
Li Chenggang, 58, former assistant trade minister at the first administration of US President Donald Trump, succeeds 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 at the Ministry of Commerce in 2022, had taken a position elsewhere. His name was no longer part of the department’s management team, according to the ministry’s website from Wednesday.
The ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters Request for comments on change, which was not explained in the Declaration of the Ministry of Human Resources.
Wang was considered a difficult negotiator and faced himself with American officials in previous meetings, said a source from the Beijing Foreign World World.
“It is a very intense bulldog,” said the source, refusing to be named.
The change within the main leaders of the Ministry of Commerce comes as Beijing continues a hard position in a business war for intensification with Washington triggered by Trump’s steep prices on imported articles in China.
The sudden change also took place in the middle of the tour of President Xi Jinping in Southeast Asia to consolidate economic and commercial ties with close neighbors in the middle of confrontation with the United States.
The Minister of Commerce, Wang Wentao, was one of the senior officials flanking XI during his visit to Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia this week.
Alfredo Montufar-Helu, China Center of the Conference Board China Center, said that the change was “very steep and potentially disruptive” given the speed with which trade tensions had intensified and in the light of Wang’s experience to negotiate with the United States since the first Trump administration.
“We can only speculate on the reasons why this has happened at this precise moment, but it may be that in the opinion of the main leadership of China, given the way the tensions continued to degenerate, they need someone else to break the dead end in which the two countries find themselves and finally start to negotiate,” he said.
Unlike several other nations that responded to Trump’s plans for punitive prices by seeking bilateral agreements with Washington, Beijing has raised its samples from American products in response and has not requested talks, which, according to her, can only be carried out on mutual respect and equality.
Washington said on Tuesday that Trump was open to concluding a trade agreement with China, but Beijing should take the first step, insisting that China needed “our money”.
“ Shock price ”
During a February meeting at the WTO in Geneva, Li criticized the United States for arbitrarily imposing prices on its business partners, including China, warning that such movements have triggered “tariff shocks” in the world.
“The United States’s unilateralist approach openly violates the WTO rules, exacerbates economic uncertainty, disrupts global trade and can even overthrow the multilateral trade-based trade system. China firmly opposes this and urges the United States to abolish its unjustified practices,” he said.
Li, who has occupied several key jobs in the Ministry of Commerce, as in the departments supervising the treaties and fair trade and trade, has university training at Elite University in Beijing and the German University of Hamburg.
“To judge by his CV, Li is a typical Chinese technocrat with vast experience in work on commercial issues at the Ministry of Commerce as well as in the WTO,” said Alfred Wu, associate professor at the National University of Singapore.
“It seems to be a routine promotion without anything abnormal, but it is obviously a sensitive period due to American-Chinese tensions.”
On March 31, Li attended a Chinese forum for private entrepreneurs as a “leader” of the Ministry of Commerce, according to a reading of the Reunion media, one of the first official clues of an imminent decision to a new role.
