Finbarr Bermingham

This story is part of an ongoing series on US-China relations, jointly produced by the South China Morning Post and POLITICO, with reporting from Asia and the United States. China has agreed to make significant purchases of US goods as part of the phase one trade deal to be signed in Washington on Wednesday. The goods will total $200 billion over two years across four industries, according to a Trump administration official and two other sources briefed on the matter. Beijing has agreed to buy manufactured goods worth around $75 billion, $50 billion of energy, $40 billion of agricultural goods and $35 billion to $40 billion in services, the three sources said. Perhaps in reciprocation, the U

Handing out servings of expensive pork as a reward for opening an account is the latest gimmick being used by a growing number of small local banks across China to lure new depositors. The fact that pork could be seen as a desirable reward for opening a bank account speaks to the country’s massive shortage of its favorite staple meat. On Monday, clients who deposited $1,430 or more in a three-month time deposit at the Linhai Rural Commercial Bank in Duqiao in Zhejiang province were then eligible to enter a lottery to win a portion of pork ranging from one to ten pounds. “The money is still my own, and the interest is good. I’m happy to receive a piece of pork in addition,” one female client,

The US and China have reached consensus on the terms of a “phase one” trade deal, multiple US media outlets have reported. Intended to be the first in a series of incremental agreements to resolve the trade war, the deal has the approval of US President Donald Trump, Bloomberg reported, citing several unnamed people briefed on the matter. As part of the agreement, the US would not only postpone tariffs on around $160 billion of Chinese goods scheduled to go into effect on Sunday, but also make cuts in duties already in place, Myron Brilliant of the US Chamber of Commerce told CNBC, citing US administration sources who had briefed him on the plans. Neither the White House nor the Office of th

At the start of the summer, a group of officials from Maine wrote to President Donald Trump, urging financial support for the state’s iconic lobster industry. China was once the second-largest importer of Maine lobster, but then Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs hit. In 2018, the market died and US lobster exports to China fell by 80% compared with a year earlier, when Chinese lobster lovers bought $128.5 million of the crustacean.  But China has not lost its taste for the delicacy; it is getting lobsters from somewhere else. The shift illustrates how Trump’s trade war is reshaping the global economy, sometimes in ways that hurt his own country. Over the first half of 2019, Canadian lobster sale

Large South Korean firms have historically been among the most successful investors in China. But, they’ve been gradually withdrawing from the country, in order to avoid tariffs on exports of their China-made products to the US and to head off a repeat of a major political crisis.  Many analysts say the efforts of South Korean firms in China should be essential study material for Western governments and businesses about the political risks of doing business in the mainland. These risks are growing as the US-China trade war threatens to draw in other nations and expand into a broader geopolitical struggle. In 2016, Seoul agreed to a long-standing request from the United States to allow the d

China’s retaliation will kill off US exports to the world’s biggest consumer market, American companies fear, after Washington hiked up tariffs on Chinese goods. The US increased tariffs from 10% to 25% on $200 billion of Chinese goods on Friday, with Beijing saying it “will have no choice but to implement countermeasures.” Jaime Castaneda, senior vice-president of the US Dairy Council, said much of his industry was already hit with a 25% tariff by China last year, which caused total dairy exports from the US to China to plunge by 48% in 2018. Any increase on import restrictions would be “a final nail in the coffin for our exports,” Castaneda said: “We don’t know exactly what China is going

As negotiators from the United States and China grow closer to clinching a deal to end the trade war, both sides will be wary of the complications that can arise from issues of language, interpretation and translation during negotiations. While both sides are negotiating in their native tongues with the help of simultaneous translation, the subsequent text will be translated into both English and Chinese. These translations will then be “scrubbed” by lawyers and technical translators in an effort to reach a final text that both sides are happy with. But history shows that this is rarely straightforward. Ambiguity is hard to avoid in international trade deals, while experienced negotiators ha

The world is running out of pork to feed Chinese people, as a swine fever epidemic sweeps across China’s pig farms. Financial services firm Rabobank says there’s not enough pork in “the whole world combined” to fill the potential supply shortfall that will hit China later this year. China is the world’s biggest pork producer and consumer. A staple food in most Chinese families, pork makes up 60% of the total meat consumption in China. However, the country is set to lose up to 200 million pigs to disease or slaughter during the African swine fever epidemic, almost three times the pig population in the United States, according to analysts. “A lot of herd will disappear due to infection and li

Good friends are forever, except maybe when it comes to friendships between countries. This is in part the thinking behind Australia’s move to ban two Chinese companies from building a next-generation telecommunications network in the country, according to the former Australian leader whose administration oversaw the ban. Australia banned tech giants Huawei and ZTE from its 5G network as a “hedge against adverse contingencies” in case relations with China soured in the future, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in an interview with the South China Morning Post this week. Turnbull, who was ousted as leader in August 2018, said that his government “decided not to allow 5G networks to

70%: the fall in profits in China’s oil processing sector in the first two months of 2019. As the impact of the country’s trade war with the United States and widespread economic slowdown continued to take root, oil processing was by far the worst performing area in China’s key industrial sectors. But new data shows worrying figures across the board in those sectors, which employ huge numbers of people. According to figures released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday, total industrial profits fell by 14% in the first two months of the year. This is the worst performance since the statistics board began measuring profits by these metrics in October 2011. China is seeking t