PETALING JAYA: The world can breathe a collective sigh of relief that the China-United States trade war had been averted, says Lim Kit Siang.
China’s President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump of United States met at the G20 meeting in Osaka yesterday.
No one knows for how long the multibillion-dollar tariff war between the two nations could be averted, Lim said.
“The world hopes that the temporary ceasefire would give the negotiators of both countries another chance to forge a permanent accord governing the vast flow of goods and services between the world’s two largest economies and herald a new international order based not on confrontation but on co-operation,” he said in a statement today.
“This was the predominant view of the Chinese scientists, academicians and IT professionals whom the DAP delegation met on a week-long fact-finding visit to Hunan and Jiangxi.”
Fairly unanimous of the view that the escalating trade dispute between the US and China is detrimental to both countries and the rest of the world, he said.
They nonetheless have the confidence and took the moral high ground that in the long run, China would not be the loser should be the trade war eventuate, he added.
“The size of the Chinese domestic market provides important advantages when it comes to innovation and it has already passed its critical mass in technological capacity and moved from imitator to innovator,” said the MP for Iskandar Puteri.
“China has become a world leader in areas such as solar energy, mobile payments and high-speed rail. Huawei is starting to use its own operating system (OS) called ‘Hongmeng’ which is 60% faster than Android.”
Lim said the the fact-finding visit was useful, informative and educational. We visited the Institute of Bast Fiber Crops of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Changsha. The Institute had previously collaborated with the National Tobacco and Kenaf Board in Malaysia and this collaboration should be revived, he added.
