US hopes of getting China to place big orders of Boeing jets have risen anew after reports of progress, including a framework agreement on TikTok, at the fourth round of trade negotiations in the Spanish capital of Madrid.
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Praising the progress, US President Donald Trump said he would meet Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Seoul, which starts at the end of next month, and plans to visit China early next year.
But why would China wish to buy US planes when Trump’s administration continues to discriminate against Chinese-built ships? Next month, steep new US port fees on Chinese-linked ships, announced in April, are set to come into effect.
The United States is understandably concerned about China’s shipbuilding capacity, which is estimated to be 200 times as big as that of the US. China dominates commercial shipbuilding globally, accounting for 57 per cent of new deliveries last year in terms of tonnage.
But the shift in shipbuilding dominance to Asia is not new and has been happening since the 1950s – first to Japan, then to South Korea before China. Today, the three East Asian industrial giants account for over 90 per cent of global shipbuilding capacity.
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Trump’s administration appears to have pinned the hopes of America’s shipbuilding revival on Japan and South Korea, which have separately agreed to invest in shipbuilding in the US.