“By shifting away from old growth drivers and moving up on the global industrial and value chain, China is seeing increasingly higher growth quality”, said Wang Jun with China Center for International Economic Exchanges.
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This was as the European Council president Donald Tusk called on China, the United States and Russian Federation to work together to prevent the descent of trade tensions into “conflict and chaos” amid an escalating trade war between China and the US.
The data weighed on Asian markets, adding to concerns about the impact from the Sino-US trade war on economic growth in China and the rest of the world.
EU’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, also said the United States has remained a “friend” of the 28-nation bloc, adding “a change in the administration does not change the friendship between countries and peoples”. Retail sales held up. -China trade war continue to temper risk appetite, the absence of any escalation of rhetoric out of Beijing or Washington over the past few days is helping support sentiment, as are strong earnings from industrial firms on Wall Street.
The one-sentence Commerce Ministry statement did not specify the legal grounds for the challenge or other details. The hurdles include the stalled renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and President Donald Trump’s threats that he will impose new tariffs – this time on the automotive sector.
They said that the European Union was willing to expand cooperation with China and step up communication and coordination with China in worldwide affairs.
“Europe and China are the world’s largest and third-largest economies”.
Key drivers of growth including spending on construction and other investments were weakening even before the dispute with Washington erupted.
Nonetheless, European officials suggest that Trump, who has also targeted Europe with tariffs, has created a window of opportunity to show that EU-China relations can be a bulwark for global trade.
China’s average per capita disposable income grew 6.6 percent year on year in real terms to 14,063 yuan (about 2,107 US dollars) in the first half of 2018, official data showed Monday.
The China-CEEC leaders’ meeting agreed to set up a 16+1 Global Partnership Center of CEEC and China in Sofia, Bulgaria to help enterprises from 17 countries better understand European Union laws and regulations, he said.
Beijing has vowed to retaliate but has not yet said what measures it will take. “For the rest of the world it begins with a bilateral trade war between the U.S. and China, but it would not end with a bilateral impact”.
China’s retaliatory tariffs, effective April 2, impose 15 to 25 per cent additional duties on Dollars 3.0 billion in U.S. imports (based on 2017 trade values).
MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe.MIWD00000PUS shed 0.13 percent. Bloomberg Economics estimates that the tariffs would shave 0.5 percentage points off GDP growth.
Despite the quarterly deceleration, growth was still higher than the annual target of around 6.5 per cent set by the government, but China nevertheless faces an “extremely complex environment both at home and abroad”, said Mao Shengyong, a spokesman for the national statistics bureau.
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To be sure, China has the means to respond given the massive fiscal and monetary firepower available to policy-makers. But that has swelled debt, prompting concerns about risks to the banking system.
