Experts welcome president's position against protectionism

President Xi Jinping's call for a liberal global trade system and opposition to protectionism at the BRICS Business Forum held in Johannesburg on Wednesday won praise from experts in the United States.

"The international community has reached a new crossroads, and we are facing a choice between cooperation and confrontation, between opening-up and a closed-door policy, and between mutual benefit and a beggar-thy-neighbor approach," Xi said at the forum where around 1,000 delegates from BRICS member countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - participated.

"President Xi is right that the world is facing a choice between opening-up and a closed-door policy," David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former economic and financial emissary to China with the US Treasury, told China Daily on Wednesday.