China yesterday offered Britain talks on a post-Brexit free trade deal, reaching out to London as Beijing remains mired in an increasingly bitter trade war with Washington, even as a senior Chinese diplomat reiterated its door remained open for dialogue.
China has been looking for allies in its fight with the US, initiated by the administration of US President Donald Trump, which has said China’s high-tech industries have stolen intellectual property from US firms and demanded that Beijing buy more US products to reduce a US$350 billion trade surplus.
Britain has pushed a strong message to Chinese companies that it is fully open for business as it prepares to leave the EU next year and China is one of the countries with which Britain would like to sign a post-Brexit free-trade deal.
Speaking to reporters in Beijing after meeting UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Jeremy Hunt, the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs and State Councilor Wang Yi (王毅), said both countries agreed to step up trade with and investment in each other.
Hunt said Wang had made an offer “to open discussions about a possible free trade deal done between Britain and China post-Brexit.”
“That’s something that we welcome and we said that we will explore,” Hunt said, without elaborating.
While a trade pact with China would be a political win for the British government, formal talks cannot begin until it officially leaves the EU next year.
In the briefing, Wang again slammed Washington for intransigence and intentionally hyping up the idea that the US is the real victim in their trade dispute.
“The responsibility for the trade imbalance between China and the United States lies not with China,” Wang said, citing the global role of the US dollar, low US savings rates, huge levels of US consumption and US restrictions on high-tech exports as amongst the reasons.
Both China and the US had appeared to have avoided a full-scale trade war in May, with China agreeing to buy more US agriculture and energy products, but the deal collapsed and the two sides slapped import tariffs on their respective goods.
Washington has since threatened to set tariffs on an additional US$450 billion worth of Chinese goods and no formal negotiations between the two countries have taken place since early last month.
China has said it is committed to resolving the dispute via talks, and has appealed to other countries to support it in upholding free trade and the multilateral trading system, though European countries in particular have many of the same market access complaints as the US.
Wang said the tensions were initiated by the US, and the two should resolve their issues under the WTO framework, rather than in accordance with US law.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to