• Li Chengang replaces veteran trading Tsar Wang Shouwen.
• Wang had been China’s top trade dealer since 2022.
• The United States insists that China should first make in any trade agreement.

On Wednesday, China unexpectedly appointed a new trading dealer key in any conversations to resolve the escalating customs war with the United States and replace Veteranhandel Tsar Wang Shouwen with his envoy to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Li Chengang, 58, a former assistant Minister of Commerce under the first administration of US President Donald Trump, takes over from Wang, 59, Human Resources and Social Security Ministry said in a statement.

It was unclear whether Wang, who took on the No 2 role at the Ministry of Commerce in 2022, had taken a post elsewhere. His name was no longer on the ministry’s leadership team, according to the ministry’s website from Wednesday.

The Ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters Request for comment on the change, which was not explained in the Human Resources Ministry’s statement.

Wang was considered a tough dealer and had clashes with US officials at previous meetings, a source said in Peking’s foreign business community.

“He is a bulldog, very intense,” the source said, refusing to be named.

The shift within the top management of the Ministry of Commerce is coming as Beijing pursues a hard line in an intensified trade war with Washington, triggered by Trump’s steep tariffs on objects imported from China.

The sudden change also took place in the midst of President Xi Jinping’s tour in Southeast Asia to consolidate financial and commercial ties with close neighbors in the middle of the standoff with the United States.

Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao was among senior officials who flanked XI on his visit to Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia this week.

Alfredo Montufar-Helu, a senior adviser to the conference board’s China Center, said the change was “very sudden and potentially disturbing” considering how fast merchant stresses had escalated and in light of Wang’s experience of negotiating with the United States since the first Trump administration.

“We can only speculate on why this happened at this exact moment, but it may be that given China’s top leadership, considering how tension has continued to escalating, they need someone else to break the curse where both countries find themselves and eventually begin to negotiate,” he said.

Unlike several other nations that have responded to Trump’s plans for penalties by seeking bilateral agreements with Washington, Beijing has raised his taxes on US goods in response and has not sought conversations, as it says can only be performed based on mutual respect and equality.

Washington said Tuesday that Trump was open to entering into a trade agreement with China, but Beijing had to make the first step and insist that China needed “our money”.

‘Tariff Smoking’

At a WTO meeting in Geneva, Li USA slammed rabbed tariffs for its trading partners, including China, and warned that such movements have triggered “Customs” to the world.

“The unilateralist approach from the United States obviously violates WTO rules, aggravates economic uncertainty, disturbs global trade and can even undermine the rules-based multilateral trading system. China opposes this and calls on the United States to abolish its wrongful practice,” he said.

Li, who has had several key jobs in the Ministry of Commerce, such as in departments with supervision of treaties and law and fair trade, has an academic background in Elite Peking University and Germany’s Hamburg University.

“Judging by his resume, Li is a typical Chinese technocrat with long experience working on trade issues at the Ministry of Commerce as well as WTO,” said Alfred Wu, associate professor at the National University of Singapore.

“It seems to be a routine promotion with nothing abnormal, but now it is obviously a sensitive period due to tension in the US China.”

On March 31, LI participated in a Chinese private entrepreneurial forum as a “leader” of the Ministry of Commerce, according to a state media reading of the meeting, one of the first official hints of an impending step to a new role.