Inside Out | Is Xi Jinping finally walking the talk on opening up China’s economy as the trade war heats up?

As most Americans – and many others worldwide – wallowed in midterm election introspection this week, China began its long march to win the hearts and minds of the world’s traders, to put some substance behind two years of mainly rhetorical commitment to globalisation and mainland market liberalisation.

There is a certain elegant symmetry to starting the week with the massively hyped China International Import Expo in Shanghai, with tens of thousands of buyers from across the country flocking to purchase imported goods, and finishing the week with Alibaba’s Singles’ Day orgy of domestic consumer spending.

After the import expo, Chinese President Xi Jinping will move on to win friends at the Association of Southeast Asian Nation summit in Singapore, where there are still faint hopes of finalising negotiations on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. He will then go on to Port Moresby for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ gathering – the second opportunity in three weeks to talk trade liberalisation with Japan’s Shinzo Abe and other members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

No effort is being spared to reinforce China’s message that it stands fully behind liberalising its economy, opening it further to international competition and using multilateral deals to do it. As Donald Trump waits for his dinner date with Xi at the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires at the end of the month, the US preference for bilateral deal-making is being firmly snubbed, despite hints from Trump to the contrary.