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Latest Business and Financial News on China, U.S. Trade War and Negotiations, Breaking News, Headlines and Developments

萌宠菠菠乐园
2025-04-15 20:51

Tariff bullying: Senior Communist Party official Xia Baolong got fired up during a national security speech in Hong Kong on Tuesday, condemning the U.S.’ 145% tariff on imports from the free port city as “outrageous bullying and utterly shameless.” Xia, the director of the Communist Party Central Committee’s Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office, said Washington “doesn’t want our ‘taxes,’ it wants our ‘life.’” And in an apparent response to U.S. Vice President J. D. Vance’s reference to Chinese as “peasants,” Xia added: “Let those American ‘peasants’ wail before the 5,000-year-old Chinese civilization!” Distinct from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong maintained a “zero tariff” policy on all goods, including American products. The U.S. has a trade surplus of $271.5 billion with Hong Kong in the last decade, making the city America’s largest trade surplus region.

Winter Games cyberattacks: Three U.S. National Security Agency agents are wanted by police in Northeast China for alleged cyberattacks on the Asian Winter Games in February, Chinese state media reported. The attacks primarily targeted critical information systems including the registration system to steal athletes’ personal data and disrupt the games, which were held in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, the report said. Ostensibly, the agents conducted simultaneous cyberattacks against important industries in Heilongjiang, including energy, transportation, water conservancy, communications, and defense research institutions, attempting to disrupt critical information infrastructure to cause social disorder and steal confidential information. The police will issue rewards for information leading to the apprehension of these three suspects, the report said.

Xi in Vietnam: During a state visit to Vietnam on Monday, President Xi Jinping urged China and Vietnam to jointly oppose hegemonism, unilateralism and protectionism. During his meeting with Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh in Hanoi, Xi said that the two countries should ensure a smooth flow of trade, firmly uphold the multilateral trading system, and work together to push for an economic globalization that is more open, inclusive, balanced and beneficial to all. The visit comes shortly after the U.S. imposed a 46% import tariff on Vietnamese goods. When asked about Xi’s visit to Vietnam, President Donald Trump said the two countries were figuring out how to “screw” the U.S. but added that he didn’t blame them for doing so. Xi will also visit Cambodia and Malaysia this week, completing his first overseas trip this year.

CATL insulated: Despite the U.S.’ 145% tariff on Chinese goods, battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL) (300750.SZ) will be largely unscathed given its limited exposure to the country, CATL said during a Monday earnings briefing. The company is negotiating solutions to the tariffs with the American customers it does have, which include Tesla Inc. CATL’s main business is electric vehicle (EV) batteries and energy storage batteries. In the first quarter of the year, the company’s sold 120 gigawatt-hours of batteries, a more than 30% year-on-year increase, of which energy storage batteries accounted for nearly 20%. CATL has drawn the ire of some U.S. politicians in recent years, particularly for its tie-up with Ford Motor Co., supplying the carmaker with its battery technology for a new factory in Michigan. The majority of the Chinese firm’s overseas business is in Europe and markets such as the Middle East and Australia.

Zhipu AI eyes IPO: Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup Zhipu AI has officially begun its IPO process, after raising over 10 billion yuan ($1.38 billion) in capital and reaching a valuation exceeding 20 billion yuan. The company filed on Monday for IPO registraion counseling with China’s securities regulator, a key compliance step before formally applying to go public. Five-year-old Zhipu AI, one of China’s earliest generative AI startups, was incubated by Tsinghua University and debuted China’s first self-developed pre-trained large language model in August 2022. Its chatbot app, ChatGLM, has around 25 million users. Ultimately, the company aims to become China’s version of OpenAI, CEO Zhang Peng said.