China-US ties seen vital for global economy

Analysts urge both nations to cooperate, stabilize supply chains, boost multilateral trade order

China and the United States should improve economic and trade cooperation to foster a steadily growing relationship, which will be not only in the interests of the two countries but is also important for the fragile world economic amid rising uncertainties, experts and analysts said.

They made the remarks as the persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical issues pose serious challenges to global industrial and supply chains, crimping trade, stoking inflation and raising gloom about world economic prospects.

The World Trade Organization recently cut its goods trade growth forecast for 2022 by about a third to 3 percent.

WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has urged governments to work with multilateral organizations like the WTO to facilitate more trade.

Restricting trade would threaten the well-being of families and businesses and make more fraught the task of building a durable economic recovery from COVID-19, she said.

Chinese analysts and business leaders have also been calling for the sound and steady development of

China-US economic and trade relations based on mutual respect and mutual benefit, to shore up world trade and economic growth.

“As the world’s two largest economies, normal trade and investment cooperation between China and US will unleash technology and trade potentials and drive up global economic growth, which has become even more important given that the world economic recovery is slowing down,” said Liu Ying, a senior researcher at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies of Renmin University of China in Beijing.

Zhou Mi, a senior researcher at the

Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, said that “considering the global inflation and rising stress on global supply chains, it has become even more urgent to reduce tariffs to facilitate enterprise cooperation and world trade growth.”

For world trade, the impact arising from damaged China-US trade relations cannot be offset by any other factors, he said.

Cooperation based on rational and pragmatic economic and trade policies toward China is the only right choice for the US.

“With the unremitting domestic inflation pressure despite raised interest rates, the US needs Chinese products and should cut tariffs on them, or at least not add more, if it really wants to protect its consumers already hit by high prices,” said Liu from the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies.

Zhang Yansheng, chief researcher at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, suggested that China deepen domestic reforms and further unleash economic vitality to cope with the situation, while leveraging market forces and promoting people-to-people exchanges to improve economic and trade cooperation between China and the US.