Chinese Vice Premier Liu He and U.S. President Donald Trump shake hands after reaching a “substantial phase one deal”

China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) has reiterated that the U.S. must lift all tariffs imposed since July last year to end the trade war, but that it is also open to a partial interim deal. Meanwhile, negotiating teams from both sides are working on a phase one deal that Presidents Trump and Xi could sign when they meet at the APEC Summit in Chile next month. The partial deal should include “progress in the direction of canceling all tariffs” imposed during the trade war. China and the United States made “concrete progress” in many areas during their latest round of talks to resolve the trade war, but negotiations must be on an equal basis, Chinese Vice Premier Liu He said. He added that the two sides had built an important foundation for the signing of a “phased deal”.

China and the United States need to move from a “trade truce” to a “trade peace”, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said as she called for efforts to ramp up the multilateral trading system amid slowing global economic growth. Georgieva is expected to visit China within the coming two months.

Joerg Wuttke, President of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, said that with the initial agreement the two countries were starting with “super light” issues to rebuild trust before moving to more profound conflicts. Wuttke said China and the U.S. were at odds in a range of areas, from technology to personal exchanges, and “trade seems to be the most minor of those conflicts. A technology war could possibly be far more severe and far more sustainable, unfortunately,” he said.

MOFCOM confirmed that foreign direct investment (FDI) in China rose by 2.9% to USD100.78 billion in the first nine months of 2019 year-on-year. However, trade and investment between China and the U.S. has declined since the beginning of 2019. MOFCOM Spokesman Gao Feng said that this shows that “the trade war is neither in line with the interest of China and the U.S., nor the interest of the whole world”, the South China Morning Post reports. During the past nine months, a total of 30,871 new foreign-funded enterprises were established. Foreign investment in high-tech industries surged 39.8% year-on-year to CNY203.8 billion, accounting for nearly 30% of the total FDI. During the period, China’s pilot free trade zones (FTZs) saw FDI inflow reach CNY98.84 billion, accounting for 14.5% of total FDI.

Chinese companies have purchased 20 million metric tons of soybeans from the United States this year, Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said. China also bought 700,000 tons of pork, 700,000 tons of sorghum, 230,000 tons of wheat and 320,000 tons of cotton from the U.S. U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed that China had already begun making new agricultural purchases from the U.S. and that the two sides had reached a “substantial phase-one deal”. China plans to increase purchases of United States agricultural products based on the two nations’ preliminary agreement. The countries’ negotiating teams are in close contact to nail down the specifics.

China’s foreign trade maintained stable performance from January to September, increasing 2.8% year-on-year, according to the General Administration of Customs. Of the total trade volume of CNY22.91 trillion in the past three quarters, the country’s exports expanded by 5.2%, while imports dropped 0.1% year-on-year.

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said China created 10.97 million jobs in the first nine months of the year, or 99.7% of the government’s full-year target. This negates U.S. President Donald Trump’s claim that China has lost 3 million jobs as a consequence of the trade war. The job creation was realized despite GDP growth in the third quarter slowing to 6.0%, the lowest quarterly expansion in 27 years. Yet the economy is still expected to meet its annual growth target as policy support strengthens, analysts said. Growth in the July-September period was 0.2 percentage point lower than in the second quarter, as a souring world economy and escalations in the ongoing trade tension with the United States hampered demand.

Huawei said it has booked over 60 5G contracts, signaling global telecom carriers’ increasing confidence in the Chinese company despite U.S. restrictions. Yang Chaobin, President of Huawei’s 5G products, said the latest figures marked a jump from Huawei’s earlier announcement of 50 contracts in September. Among the total contracts, 32 are from Europe, 11 from the Middle East, 10 from the Asia-Pacific, seven from the Americas and one from Africa. Hauwei also announced that it has built a joint innovation center with Sunrise, the second-largest telecom carrier in Switzerland, to promote cross-sector cooperation. German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said that “we are not taking a preemptive decision to ban any actor, or any company”. “Without Huawei, Germany will be far behind other leading European countries for several years,” according to Zheng Chunrong, Dean of the Germany Research Institute at Tongji University in Shanghai.

This year, Huawei plans to manufacture 600,000 5G base stations, rising to 1.5 million in 2020. Since 2018, Huawei has released a series of 5G commercial products, including the world’s first chipset for 5G base stations, Tiangang, and Balong 5,000, Huawei’s first 7-nanometer multi-code 5G chipset. Huawei has reported a revenue rise of 24.4% to CNY610.8 billion in the first nine months of 2019, higher than its first-half revenue growth rate of 23.2%. A private firm, Huawei had not published its quarterly results before. The new results show that the company continues to grow despite being added to the U.S. Entity List, which bans American companies from selling technology and products to Huawei. More than 185 million Huawei smartphones were shipped in the first three quarters of 2019, up 26% year-on-year