Summary of the summit – The Wire China

Good evening. There was no knockout blow when Trump 2.0 met Xi 3.0 in Beijing this month for the two presidents’ highly anticipated summit. But did one of them win on points? This week’s cover story asks seven Chinese and American experts and former government officials – as well as a relative of a Chinese prisoner of conscience – to assess the meeting and its results. On the still-central issue of Taiwan, Chinese officials were hoping for a repeat of Donald Trump’s 2018 “surrender summit” with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, when he said he believed Putin’s assurances that Russia had not interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and not evidence to the contrary provided by the U.S. intelligence community. In the end, Beijing did not get what it wanted. Trump has said or done nothing that has fundamentally changed long-standing U.S. policy toward Taiwan, although that mettle will be tested later this year when he decides whether to proceed with a $14 billion arms sale to the island. For now, Xi Jinping can take comfort that Trump’s broader approach to the world’s most important bilateral relationship appears to have shifted from serial confrontation to a preference for constructive stability.

And in this week’s podcastSavannah Billman and Rachel Cheung discuss Rachel’s recent reporting on under-the-radar companies profiting from the rise of AI in China.

Other topics in this week’s issue: the companies invited to the Xi and Trump summit dinner, Victor Shih on Trump versus Xi II, and Alicia García-Herrero and Elina Ribakova on Russia and China, unequal partners. Plus, Chinese memory chips and a chat with Joe Studwell about his new book How Africa works and the role of China in the development of the continent.

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A Fox News host, a Chinese academic and…

…the head of Donald Trump’s advance team walks into a bar. Well, it wasn’t a bar. But Fox News host Bret Baier, Fudan University’s Wu Xinbo and White House staffer John Hiller were seated together at Xi Jinping’s official welcome banquet for Donald Trump, held at the Great Hall of the People. John F. Kennedy’s Camelot, the Trump administration is not, so Baier and Hiller were surprised that an academic was invited to such a state function, according to Wu, who is a leading Chinese Americanologist and a member of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s policy advisory board. In this week’s cover story, China thread He talks to Wu and many others about their views on this month’s summit.

Guess who’s coming to dinner

My CEOs are bigger and better than your CEOs, Trump seemed to be saying, pointing to the powerful business bosses recruited to serve in his Beijing entourage. In this week’s Big Picture, Savannah Billman examines China Inc’s opposing lineup.

How Trump Helped Xi Trump Trump

“Trump’s second term began with a relatively good hand for the United States: a strong network of alliances, cooling price pressures, significant funding for green energy and semiconductor subsidies, and global leadership in science and technology in most areas,” writes Victor Shih in an opinion piece on the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing. What a shame, says Shih, that the American president threw away most of it before arriving in the Chinese capital.

Xi’s Russian mini-me

Beggars, not choosers

A global shortage of memory chips could be a boon for Chinese competitors in a market long dominated by South Korean and American suppliers, writes Noah Berman. Although sourcing from companies like ChangXin Memory Technologies and Yangtze Memory Technologies carries a lot of political risk for U.S. buyers like Apple and Dell, it may be a risk they must take.

A Q&A with Joe Studwell

Joe Studwell is the author of Asian sponsorsa classic examination of the richest families of Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, and two other books on China and Asia. His latest work focuses on economic development in Africa.

In conversation with Andrew Peaple, Studwell questions whether African countries can emulate East Asia’s economic successes and China’s role in the continent’s development. “Chinese state-owned banks have lent about $150 billion to Africa and that has made a huge difference,” he says. “Eighty percent of the money was spent on infrastructure. »

Joe Studwell

Illustration by Lauren Crow

SOPA2026 Prize

China threadRachel Cheung of , was named a finalist in two categories of this year’s competition Society of Asian Editors Award: Young journalist of the year and Excellence in artistic and cultural reporting. Rachel has been cited for her writing on Chinese quantum computing, robotics, the Hong Kong investment craze, AI in healthcare, and China’s book publishing industry.

All of Rachel’s nominated articles are now readable for free on thewirechina.com. SOPA winners will be announced on June 18.

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