Today the World Bank marked the news about China’s free trade talk in ASEAN as its website top headline, and listed the major international media’s reports anout China in ASEAN:
“Leaders in South-East Asia signed a ground-breaking agreement with China Sunday that liberalizes trade in services, five years after a similar pact on goods.
The agreements will help countries such as Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore to tap China’s growing economic might. The balance of power has long been tilted in favor of their larger neighbor, which has a multibillion-pound trade deficit with a region that is feeding its relentless appetite for raw materials. The agreements are among the most recent achievements by Asia’s answer to the European Union, the ten-member Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). …” [The Times (UK, 01/15)/Factiva]
” Conference delegates billed the trade and services deal, which emphasizes high-technology services, energy and construction, as a major step forward in establishing a comprehensive free trade pact between ASEAN and China. ASEAN leaders and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China also reiterated a 2002 agreement pledging to resolve the dispute over claims by China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. China and ASEAN began lowering barriers to trading in 2005. Since then, tariffs on more than 7,000 products from China and ASEAN have been lowered, Wen said. Two-way trade volume last year amounted to more than $160 billion, up 23 percent from 2005. ” [The International Herald Tribune (01/15)/Factiva]
[Full Text]Read related Op-Ed piece from AndhraCafe. com about India, China race
