The US-China trade war is the \u201cstupidest thing in the world,\u201d Alibaba e-commerce tycoon Jack Ma declared at an import fair that China opened on Monday partly to counter foreign criticism of its trade policies.<\/p>\n
Ma, who recently took back an earlier pledge to create a million jobs in the US — blaming the trade war launched by Donald Trump — made the comments in a panel discussion at the massive expo in Shanghai.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrade is to form … peace. Trade is to communicate…nobody can stop free trade.\u201d President Xi Jinping opened the China International Import Expo earlier Monday with a vague pledge to widen access to his country\u2019s economy, as Beijing faces growing impatience from trading partners.<\/p>\n
But he also delivered a veiled rebuke to Trumpism, decrying \u201cprotectionism\u201d, \u201cisolationism\u201d and \u201cthe law of the jungle\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ma, the billionaire owner of China\u2019s largest online shopping portal, made the headline-grabbing job-creation promise to Trump last year, when Beijing was still courting the then-newly elected president.<\/p>\n
But Ma told official news agency Xinhua in September that the trade war had \u201cdestroyed the premise the promise was made on.\u201d Anger over the trade surpluses that China enjoys has triggered growing foreign criticism and the worsening commercial conflict with Washington, which has seen both sides impose punitive tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods.<\/p>\n
Beijing has touted the first annual import expo as a sign of its willingness to take in more imports and thereby reduce the surpluses.<\/p>\n
Ma, who announced in September that he would step aside in a year\u2019s time to focus on philanthropy, said China\u2019s plans to remake itself as an importing nation would provoke resistance from vested interests.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor my understanding, it\u2019s the greatest challenge for China. It\u2019s a great opportunity for the world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The US-China trade war is the \u201cstupidest thing in the world,\u201d Alibaba e-commerce tycoon Jack Ma declared at an import fair that China opened on Monday partly to counter foreign criticism of its trade policies. Ma, who recently took back an earlier pledge to create a million jobs in the US — blaming the trade […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46523,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46522"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46524,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46522\/revisions\/46524"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}