Economy
China seeks global trade gains as Trump tariffs bite
China sees an opening to turn U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs to its advantage by reshaping global trade in ways that would insulate its $19 trillion economy from U.S. pressure far into the future. Beijing is exploiting the uncertainty created by Trump to try to stitch China’s vast manufacturing base into the world’s biggest economic blocs, including the European Union, Gulf States and a trans-Pacific trade pact, a Reuters examination found. The push involves accelerating efforts to clinch some 20 trade deals in total, many years in the making, despite widespread concerns about China’s overproduction, uneven market access and soft domestic demand.
A Reuters review of 100 Chinese-language articles by state-backed trade scholars written since 2017 reveals a systematic push by China’s policy advisers to reverse-engineer U.S. trade policy and neutralize Washington’s containment strategy. China is now putting that blueprint into action. The deal reached with Canada during Prime Minister Mark Carney’s January visit to Beijing – which slashes tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles – was the first of many aimed at breaking U.S. leverage, according to interviews with 10 people, including Chinese officials and trade diplomats.
“Don’t interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake,” said one Chinese official of Trump’s disruptive trade agenda.
The review, drawn from over 2,000 trade-strategy papers endorsed by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and Peking University, which advise top leaders, shows policy insiders broadly accept that painful structural change is a price worth paying for China’s long-term dominance of global commerce. The papers’ contents are reported here for the first time.
If successful, Beijing could upend more than a decade of U.S. trade policy by placing itself at the heart of a new, China-shaped multilateral order, two Western diplomats said.
“The Chinese have a golden opportunity now,” said Alicia Garcia Herrero, senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank.
China’s commerce ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment about Beijing’s strategy.
Asked about China’s approach, a U.S. official told Reuters it was no surprise that countries with large trade surpluses sought to maintain globalization.
“President Trump is fixing the problems globalization caused for the United States while other countries are trying to double down on globalization as free market access to the United States goes away,” the official said.
BUILDING BLOCS
Building blocs
The shift in China’s tone reflects its calculations. A year ago, Beijing was invoking Mao Zedong and its ability to fend off the West in the Korean War with martial propaganda.
Now, as China prepares to welcome Trump in April, its diplomats are touring the world urging trading partners to join it in defending multilateralism and open trade. In January, China dispatched its top diplomat to tiny Lesotho – which Trump initially hit with a 50% tariff – to pledge development cooperation. On Saturday, state media said China would implement zero tariffs on imports from 53 African countries. Meanwhile, China is pitching AI-powered customs systems to neighbors and working to retool digital infrastructure that underpin commerce.
The moves underline a goal identified in the policy papers: to embed China so deeply in global trade that partners can’t afford to decouple under U.S. pressure.
“In countering U.S. strategic competition with China, ‘anti-decoupling’ should become China’s primary focus,” wrote Ni Feng, fellow at CASS’s Institute of American Studies, in 2024.
Chinese officials are now working to fast-track stalled trade talks. Since 2017, China has been negotiating with countries including Honduras, Panama, Peru, South Korea and Switzerland.
“We are willing to negotiate bilateral and regional trade and investment agreements with interested countries and regions,” Commerce Ministry spokesperson He Yongqian told Reuters during Carney’s visit, without elaborating. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi surprised European negotiators in November by raising the prospect of a free-trade agreement with Brussels during talks with his Estonian counterpart. A month later, Wang pressed the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to conclude long-running talks on a free-trade agreement. In January, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer agreed with Chinese leader Xi Jinping to launch a feasibility study into a trade-in-services agreement that could reduce barriers for British firms. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said he will seek “strategic partnerships” with China during a trip next week.
China’s commerce minister Wang Wentao has made joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) a priority. The pact has its roots in the U.S.-backed Trans-Pacific Partnership, developed in part to counter China before Washington withdrew in 2017.
But China’s huge trade surplus complicates the pitch. Some member countries worry Chinese manufacturers may use improved market access to funnel excess low-cost goods abroad, while China’s domestic demand remains sluggish.
Wendy Cutler, chief negotiator during the Obama administration for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, acknowledged the window for Beijing to champion trade and multilateralism but said China needed to go beyond talk.
“And with its huge trade imbalances, as well as some of the coercive measures it’s now taking against countries like Japan, it’s hard to see how they’re walking the walk,” Cutler told Reuters.
A senior European trade diplomat dismissed Beijing’s overtures as “pure Chinese propaganda,” saying Brussels had no plans for a trade deal. Chinese advisers are undeterred. Speaking to Reuters, one noted the EU and China had negotiated a landmark 2020 investment deal during Trump’s first term. The deal, however, was frozen in 2021 before it could take effect amid a dispute over human-rights sanctions.
Lessons learned
Some Chinese advisers contend in the papers that Beijing should study how Washington has “weaponized” global institutions to contain China, and exploit openings created by Trump’s willingness to abandon or sideline multilateral bodies such as the World Trade Organization.
Others argue Beijing should focus on influencing global standards in fields such as intellectual property through initiatives like Xi’s Belt and Road program and China’s membership of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which covers about 30% of global GDP.
China is now applying those insights. Its recently upgraded deal with Southeast Asian states, for example, focuses on AI-driven and digital trade, where China hopes to secure a first-mover advantage.
Indeed, China’s vision for customs processing is evident at its “Friendship Port” on the Vietnamese border, where state media says home-grown AI solutions have slashed waiting times by 20%, enabling faster deliveries. Reuters couldn’t independently verify the claim.
Trillion-dollar surplus
The risks that China’s $1.2 trillion trade surplus poses to trading partners’ manufacturing sectors are hard to overlook, however. Pascal Lamy, former WTO director-general and EU trade commissioner, said Chinese firms are sending more goods to Europe than the bloc can absorb.
“It’s a mystery how, given the nature of the regime, given the sort of collective cleverness, how is it that they have not succeeded in rebalancing their economic model?” he said. Not everyone sees closer ties with China as the easiest way to curb reliance on the U.S.
Stephen Nagy, China project lead at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, said Carney’s tariff-cutting agreement with Xi appears designed to build leverage before talks over the U.S.-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade deal.
“I think his bet is wrong,” he added, predicting that Trump wouldn’t be swayed. Carney has said Canada respects its USMCA commitment not to pursue free-trade deals with non-market economies. His office didn’t respond to a request for comment. Mexico, for its part, is wary of endangering U.S. market access by moving too close to China.
“We see no need for a free-trade agreement with China right now,” said a Mexican trade official. “We are already in the CPTPP and have 60% of world GDP covered.”
Beijing’s trade partners really need China to revive its consumption, said Fred Neumann, chief economist for Asia Pacific at HSBC. Wang, China’s commerce minister, has said growing imports is a priority as Beijing prepares to launch its next five-year plan in March, in line with a commitment to raise consumption’s share of GDP. But rebalancing is a long-term project. Trump has three years left in office, and the next administration could revert to building coalitions to contain China.
China must “study in depth the logic of U.S. actions within international institutions and the possible next steps it may take to better respond to increasingly fierce strategic offensives in the future,” Zhao Pu, then at Renmin University and now a researcher at CASS’s Institute of American Studies, wrote in 2023.
The European Central Bank (ECB) announced on Thursday it had fined JPMorgan a total of 12.2 million euros ($14.4 million) for misreporting risk, the largest fine so far levied by the Frankfurt institution.
The U.S. investment bank has been found that it had misclassified some transactions and excluded others from its calculations between 2019 and 2024, the ECB said.
“This occurred because, for 15 consecutive quarters, the bank misclassified corporate exposures and applied a lower risk-weight for credit risk to them than what banking rules prescribe,” it said in a statement.
It said JPMorgan had reported that its capital buffers were bigger than they actually were.
“The bank committed both breaches with serious negligence, driven by evident deficiencies in its internal processes,” the ECB said.
“The bank’s internal controls did not detect the breaches in a timely manner,” it added.
Banks are required to keep a certain amount of cash or highly liquid assets on their books in proportion to the amount of risky holdings they have.
Artificially lowering the proportion of risky assets on its books would have freed up cash for JPMorgan to invest in other areas.
The ECB last week fined French bank Credit Agricole 7.55 million euros for being too slow to evaluate its climate change-related risk in response to a request from the central bank.
The former governors of the Spanish and Dutch central banks are seen as the front-runners to replace Christine Lagarde at the helm of the European Central Bank (ECB), likely in a broader political deal that could see both of them end up with a major job.
Lagarde plans to leave her position before the end of her term to give outgoing French President Emmanuel Macron a say in picking her successor before elections that could be won by the Eurosceptic far-right, the Financial Times said on Wednesday.
Economists said an early Lagarde exit boosted the chances of European leaders agreeing to fill in a package all three ECB Executive Board seats that are set to come up for grabs next year: Lagarde’s own, that of chief economist Philip Lane in May 2027 and Isabel Schnabel’s at the end of 2027.
Former Dutch governor Klaas Knot and his Spanish colleague Pablo Hernandez de Cos were seen by economists as the leading candidates for two of those seats, meaning whoever did not get the top job could get another.
Both are perceived as experienced central bankers who would guard the ECB from political pressure – a hot topic after U.S. President Donald Trump’s vocal demands on the Federal Reserve (Fed) – and not deliver major surprises when setting interest rates, which have now been on hold for eight months.
“It’s certain that these decisions will be linked to each other and put in some compromise deal,” Piet Haines Christiansen, chief strategist at Danske Bank, said. “They’re close in time and it’s the same pool of candidates.”
Hawks and doves
As national central bank governors, the two men sat on the ECB’s rate-setting Governing Council.
Knot was a policy hawk who often dissented with the ECB’s brand of easy-money policy under former chief Mario Draghi but mellowed towards the end of his term, which ran out last June.
De Cos, a dove who showed he was able to change his mind when inflation surged in 2022, took a job as the head of the Bank for International Settlements only last summer.
That could give Knot an advantage if Lagarde’s job were to come up very soon.
“It could boost Knot’s chances, which is a good outcome because he has credibility and a good reputation as a pragmatic hawk,” Frederik Ducrozet, head of macroeconomic research at Pictet Wealth Management, said.
He added De Cos may come across as “a little too dovish”, referring to lower interest rates that favor indebted southern European countries such as Italy and Greece over those with lower debt in the north, such as Germany and the Netherlands.
On the other hand, Nomura’s economist Andrzej Szczepaniak noted Spain had never provided an ECB President, unlike the Netherlands, and that EU leaders have just chosen Croatia’s central banker Boris Vujcic, a policy hawk, as the central bank’s vice-president – both factors that would help de Cos.
Germans want top job
For Germany, Bundesbank head Joachim Nagel has shown interest in becoming the euro zone’s top central banker, as has existing ECB board member Schnabel who may, however, face legal hurdles remaining on the Executive Board as its terms are not renewable.
Europe’s biggest economy, which hosts the ECB headquarters in Frankfurt, has never held the presidency.
Economists agreed that all the candidates were competent and would ensure continuity at an institution which prides itself on being impermeable to government pressure when it sets rates.
This brand of central bank independence is coming under threat in the United States, where Trump is trying to exert greater control over the Fed, and potentially in Britain, where the right-wing Reform U.K. party has floated changes to the Bank of England and budget office.
“Everyone wants to keep the ECB in stable hands and they want the person who is ECB president to have strong market credibility,” Rebecca Christie, a senior fellow at Bruegel, said. “All the top candidates right now have that”
Only last week, French central bank governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau resigned, meaning Macron will get to appoint his successor too before the spring 2027 presidential election.
Wildcard candidates
Equally, all observers cautioned that euro zone governments, which choose the ECB’s president before European Parliament ratifies it, could come up with a surprise name – as Lagarde herself was at the time of her nomination.
The appointment is normally part of a broader negotiation that also involves the job of President of the European Commission. Last time, this went to Germany’s Ursula von der Leyen, freeing up France to secure the top ECB job.
An early Lagarde departure might, however, decouple the positions, according to Spyros Andreoupoulos, founder of the Thin Ice Macroeconomics consultancy, given that von der Leyen’s term runs until 2029.
“It is really too early in the process to have strong convictions on the identity of the next President,” Dutch bank ABN-Amro said in a note to clients. “There may well be some politics in the decision, which opens the door to new candidates.”
Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s state-owned national rail operator, said Thursday it would cut about 6,000 jobs at its cargo subsidiary in a bid to boost profitability and reduce dependence on government funds.
“The current restructuring plan envisages a reduction of approximately 6,000 jobs at DB Cargo,” Deutsche Bahn said in a blog post.
“The plan is to implement this in a socially responsible manner.”
Loss-making DB Cargo is facing an EU investigation under state aid rules, and an official decision is due in October.
Cutting 6,000 jobs – about half the firm’s workforce – would help the cargo division stand on its own two feet, Deutsche Bahn said.
“The goal is to align DB Cargo with European growth markets, streamline structures and thus make it sustainably profitable,” it said.
“This will enable the company to comply with the conditions of an EU competition procedure.”
Turkish tea export revenues jumped 66% in January compared to the same period last year, reaching $2.1 million (TL 91.92 million), according to a report on Thursday based on the data from a provincial association.
The tea was sold to 51 countries, autonomous and free zones, in January, according to a data compilation by Anadolu Agency (AA) from the Eastern Black Sea Exporters Association (DKIB).
The recorded Turkish tea exports in the first month of last year were around $1.26 million, the report suggested.
In terms of quantity, foreign sales, which were 208 tons in January last year, increased by 28% this year, rising to 267 tons.
The U.K. ranked first as the leading location for tea exports from Türkiye, contributing revenue of around $891,117. It was followed by Germany with $283,455 and the U.S. with $114,743.
Şaban Turgut, vice chairperson of the board of directors at DKIB, in his assessment to AA, said that they had a strong start to the year in tea exports.
Turgut stated that the increase in January is promising for the sector, adding: “Starting the year with an increase both in terms of value and quantity is extremely pleasing for our sector. The increased demand for Turkish tea in the European market, in particular, shows that our promotional activities and quality-focused production are bearing results.”
Moreover, he emphasized that they will focus on exporting value-added and branded products.
“We aim not only to increase the quantity but also to develop value-added exports. Our efforts to increase tea exports in the packaged, branded and special product segments continue. We aim to promote the natural, aromatic and quality structure of Turkish tea in more countries. We plan to expand into new markets in addition to deepening in existing ones,” he conveyed.
Consumer confidence in Türkiye improved in February, with the index rising 2.3% from the previous month to 85.7 points, official data showed Thursday.
The index stood at 83.7 in January, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat).
Among subindices, the sub-index measuring the financial situation of households at present rose 4.6% in February compared with the previous month, and expectations for household financial conditions over the next 12 months climbed 4.2%, data revealed.
Expectations for spending on durable goods over the next 12 months climbed 1.3% on a monthly basis.
On the other hand, expectations for the general economic situation over the next year edged down 0.1% in February.
The consumer confidence index is considered a key indicator of economic sentiment, reflecting households’ views on financial conditions, the broader economy, and spending intentions.
The index can take a value between zero and 200. It indicates an optimistic outlook when the index is above 100 and a pessimistic outlook when it is below 100.
Total home sales in Türkiye were slightly down in the first month of 2026, official data showed on Thursday, reversing the recent trend of strong demand in the property market despite higher borrowing costs in the country.
A total of 111,480 houses were sold in Türkiye in January, marking a 4.7% decrease from the same month last year, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) data revealed. In January 2025, the country recorded 117,025 housing sales.
This comes after a record year for the property market with close to 1.7 million sales last year, more than 14% compared to a year earlier.
The renewed version of the housing report, shared once a month by the statistics office, also included commercial property sales for the first time.
The report also, instead of focusing on cumulative housing unit sales, displayed in detail sales separated into new and second-hand house sales, as well as commercial sales.
New home sales in the country dropped 2.1% year-over-year to 34,069 units in January, while second-hand sales decreased 5.9% over the same period to 77,411 units, TurkStat said.
New sales accounted for 30.6%, while second-hand house sales accounted for 69.4% of total house sales, the report said.
Mortgage-financed sales surged 15.7% from a year earlier, totaling 20,263 homes and accounting for 18.2% of all transactions.
Sales to foreign buyers, however, declined 20.8% to 1,306 units. Russians, Iranians, and Ukrainians made up the largest share of foreign purchasers.
At the same time, the data revealed that new commercial property sales decreased by 9.2% in January compared to the same month of the previous year to 3,444 units. Second-hand commercial property sales were down by 14.5% yearly to 9,823 units, TurkStat said.
The Turkish central bank cut the key interest rate by 100 basis points to 37% in January, continuing an easing cycle, albeit at a slower pace in the face of a stronger uptick in monthly prices.
The data shared by the bank earlier this week showed that the Residential Property Price Index (RPPI), which measures quality-adjusted price changes in the sector, posted a monthly increase of 3.7%.
The RPPI increased annually by 27.7% in nominal terms and decreased by 2.3% in real terms, the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye (CBRT) said.
According to the data, the highest annual increase in January was observed in eastern provinces like Bingöl, Elazığ, and Malatya at 34.2%, while the lowest annual rise was observed in western provinces of Edirne, Kırklareli and Tekirdağ at 18.2%.
JPMorgan hit with European Central Bank’s biggest fine ever
Türkiye plans to require ID verification for social media users
BREAKING NEWS… Ministry of National Defense: We are taking all necessary measures in line with the interests of our country.
JPMorgan hit with European Central Bank’s biggest fine ever
Türkiye plans to require ID verification for social media users
BREAKING NEWS… Ministry of National Defense: We are taking all necessary measures in line with the interests of our country.
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