Asian stocks open mostly higher on US-China trade talks hopes

Asian stocks opened the third session of the week with positive performance, with Japanese, Chinese and Australian stock indices rising, while Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index, and New Zealand's stocks declined in addition to South Korea's Kospi Index fell following the release of economic developments and data from the Asian economies on Wednesday.

Chinese stocks led the rallies with gains of more than 1 percent after Bloomberg news agency reported that US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer will head to China on Monday in the first high-level face-to-face trade negotiations between the world's two biggest economists since the talks between Washington and Beijing collapsed last May.

We also followed some reports stating that China started to buy US agricultural products and kept its promises which were agreed upon at the last G20 summit in Japan. The report also pointed out that the US administration in turn has to fulfill its promises and cancel the ban on Huawei, bearing in mind that without that move the two sides will be discouraged from reaching a trade deal and China will stop buying American products again.

In another context, we followed South Korea's request to the Japanese government earlier today to cancel its plan to remove it from the white list, which is a list that has a minimum trade restrictions in Japan, as today is the deadline for the Japanese government's comment on the plan to remove South Korea from the list, according to the Nikkei Asian Review on Tuesday.

Japanese stock indexes rose during today's trading session, with the broader Topix index rising by 0.37% to win 5.73 points up to the level of 1,574.55, Nikkei 225 rose by 0.50% to win 107.99 points up to the level of 21,728.87.

China's benchmark index, CSI 300 rose by 1.12% to 42.48 points to reach 3,832.39. The Shanghai Composite Index rose by 1.08% and gained 31.24 points to 2,931.18.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng rose 0.96% (272.06 points) to 28,738.54, while South Korea's Kospi fell 0.05% (1.01 points) to 2,100.44.

To New Zealand's NZX 50, which fell by 0.36% (39.35 points) to reach 10,827.89. On the other hand, Australia's S&P/ASX 200 index gained 0.82% (54.98 points) to reach 6,779.60.