WSJ wins award for its trade coverage

The Wall Street Journal has won the Hinrich Foundation Award for Distinguished Reporting on Trade from the National Press Foundation for its coverage of how Beijing has used its power and political leverage to give Chinese companies a permanent advantage in the global marketplace.

The winning team of six Journal foreign correspondents who reported from Asia and Europe was Valentina Pop, Sha Hua, Stu Woo, Daniel Michaels, Matthew Dalton and Yang Jie. Pop is now with the Financial Times in Brussels.

The Journal’s coverage showed how China has attempted to use its muscle to reshape the rules of global trade. In one story, Pop, Hua and Michaels showed how China has attempted to dominate the institutions that define the vital technical and industrial standards for cutting edge technology, from lightbulbs to 5G.

Dalton reported from Paris on how China has provided billions in subsidies to state-owned companies to acquire manufacturing plants in the West — including a French maker of high-speed train wheels — and then slashed prices.

In a third story, Stu Woo in London and Yang Jie in Tokyo chronicled how the United States tried to keep Huawei Technologies Co. from acquiring a Dutch machine it needed to manufacture advanced semiconductors.

National Press Foundation judges praised the high quality of the reporting and analysis that detailed for readers how China’s quest to wrest control over international norms previously controlled by the United States is “setting the stage for skirmishes to come.”