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Xi Jinping has urged global business leaders to work together to protect supply chains at a meeting with a group of executives including Rajesh Subramaniam of FedEx and Bill Winters of Standard Chartered.
Amid a deepening trade war with the US, the Chinese leader told the group, which also included Pascal Soriot of AstraZeneca and Miguel Ángel López Borrego of Thyssenkrupp, that foreign business leaders should resist behaviours that “turn back the clock” on history.
“We hope everyone can take a broad and long-term view . . . and not blindly follow actions that disrupt the security and stability of global industrial and supply chains, but instead contribute more positive energy and certainty to global development,” Xi told the gathering in Beijing on Friday.
The event at the Great Hall of the People marked the second consecutive year that Xi held a carefully staged meeting with foreign CEOs in the Chinese capital. Last year’s event was held exclusively with US business leaders.
The meeting came at the conclusion of a busy week for Chinese policymakers, who are trying to strengthen relations with international business amid rising tensions with US President Donald Trump’s administration.
China’s premier annual CEO conference, the China Development Forum, was held in Beijing earlier this week, followed by the Boao Forum for Asia in the tropical resort island of Hainan.
Beijing is seeing to promote itself as a bastion of stability in global trade in contrast to the US, where Trump has launched successive waves of tariffs on products from aluminium to cars.
The president has vowed widespread, reciprocal duties on US trading partners on April 2, threatening further disruption to international trade.
“A few countries are building ‘small yards with high walls’, setting up tariff barriers, and politicising, instrumentalising, weaponising, and over-securitising economic and trade issues,” said Xi, who was accompanied by his foreign, commerce and finance ministers.
He said these actions were forcing companies “to take sides and make choices that go against economic principles”.
“This runs counter to the overarching trend of open markets,” he said.
He said foreign enterprises, especially multinational corporations, had “considerable international influence”.
“We hope everyone will . . . resist regressive moves that turn back the clock,” Xi said. “Together, we must safeguard the stability of global industrial and supply chains . . . Decoupling and severing ties harms others without benefiting oneself; it leads nowhere.”
While Beijing is trying to present itself as a champion of globalisation, trading partners including the EU as well as the US accuse it of running huge surpluses while not doing enough to stimulate domestic demand.
They argue that China helps its companies with favourable industrial policy, deep subsidies and cheap finance, while using hundreds of formal and informal barriers to protect the domestic market.
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