Like I’ve been saying, my read of the mood in China the past few weeks is that it has shifted markedly:
- “China suddenly added a new member to its negotiating team — the country’s commerce minister, Zhong Shan, who is seen as a hard-liner by many officials in Washington.
- “The U.S. side has provoked economic and trade frictions against us and violated the principles of the WTO. It is typical of unilateralism and protectionism. … We have to uphold our warrior spirit in firmly defending national and people’s interests in defending the multilateral trading system,” Zhong told the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party in China.
- “Trade progress has been in reverse,” says Donald Straszheim, head of Evercore ISI’s China research team.”