Li Chenggang, 58, a former assistant commerce minister during the first administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, takes over from Wang, 59, the human resources and social security ministry said in a statement.
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.
The abrupt change also took place in the middle of President Xi Jinping's tour of Southeast Asia to consolidate economic and trading ties with close neighbours amid the standoff with the U.S.
“This is certainly a change given how quickly trade tensions have escalated since Liberation Day, especially given Wang Shouwen's experience in negotiating with the U.S. since the first Trump administration,“ said Alfredo Montufar-Helu, a senior advisor to the Conference Board’s China Center.
“We can only speculate as to why this happened at this precise moment; but it might be that in the view of China's top leadership, given how tensions have continued escalating, they need someone else to break the impasse in with both countries find themselves and finally start negotiating,“ he said.
Washington said on Tuesday that Trump was open to making a trade deal with China but Beijing should make the first move, insisting that China needed “our money”.
At a February WTO meeting in Geneva, Li slammed the U.S. for arbitrarily imposing tariffs on its trading partners, including China, warning that such moves have triggered “tariff shocks” to the world.
Li, who has held several key jobs in the commerce ministry, such as in departments overseeing treaties and law and fair trade, has an academic background in the elite Peking University and Germany's Hamburg University.
The step came after official data showed annual foreign direct investment plummeted 27.1% in local currency terms in 2024, its largest such drop since the 2008 global financial crisis.
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