HONG KONG — China unveiled a series of measures on Monday aimed at strengthening financial ties with neighboring nations — and potentially weakening Asia’s ties to the United States.
The moves underscore China’s rising economic clout, as it competes more aggressively for trade deals and investment dollars.
On Monday, South Korea and China, already its largest trading partner, struck a broad agreement, removing tariffs on 90 percent of goods. Top officials from Australia, which trades more with China than with the United States, are on the verge of a similar deal.
Politics, too, play a role. With President Obama and other world leaders arriving in Beijing for the 21-economy Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, China wants to show that it is intervening less in markets.
In that vein, China’s central bank unexpectedly pushed up the heavily controlled value of the country’s currency, the renminbi, on Monday morning in the sharpest single-day move in more than four years; the change makes goods from other countries more competitive in the Chinese market.
And Chinese securities regulators announced on the same day that they would begin allowing investors in Shanghai and Hong Kong to trade on each other’s stock markets on Nov. 17, a step that could strengthen both cities’ roles as financial centers in Asia.
President Obama did announce on Tuesday morning that the United States had reached a bilateral understanding with China on eliminating tariffs for a wide range of information technology products, including video game consoles, computer software, medical equipment, GPS devices and next-generation semiconductors. China and the United States will now try to persuade other countries to accept the same terms so as to broaden their understanding into a global pact under the auspices of the World Trade Organization in Geneva.
While the United States still exports many high-technology goods, China is the world’s dominant exporter overall of electronics and has much to gain from an elimination of tariffs as well. Asian neighbors like Taiwan, South Korea and Japan increasingly find themselves supplying China’s huge electronics industry, deepening their economic dependence on decisions made in Beijing......
www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/business/...conomic-links.html?_r=0
There was China's president, Xi Jinping, Russia's president Vladimir Putin to his right, next to Philippine president Aquino and the uberwealthy Sultan of Brunei Hassanal Bolkiah. And then there is Barack Obama, right in the middle of the "wives club"
www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-10/china-sending-america-message
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