Mr Xi goes to Washington — Stability amid tension?

Welcome to China in Context from the Soaz China Institute at the University of London. I'm Duncan Hwitt. Donald Trump's visit to Beijing in May this year, the first by a [music] US president in almost a decade, was seen as a chance to reset relations after a year of tariff [music] wars and tension in the US over Chinese technology. President Trump came away with Chinese pledges to buy more US agricultural goods and Boeing aircraft and the two sides agreed to set up boards of trade and investment and build what they called a constructive relationship of strategic stability. One of the other outcomes was this month's visit to the White House by Cining accompanied by First Lady Pong Yuen and a delegation of Chinese entrepreneurs and company bosses. But there are still many sources of tension. In the run-up to this visit, talks were held between the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant and China's Vice Premier Hurley Fong with the aim of extending the temporary one-year trade truce, which the two sides agreed last October. After the meeting, Beijing announced that it would tighten controls on the export of precursor chemicals for the drug fentinil, which the US accuses China of supplying to Mexican drug cartels. Bessant and her also discussed establishing a USChina AI dialogue amidst global anxiety about the safety of artificial intelligence. And there has been speculation that Washington could further delay the delivery of a 14 billion arms package to Taiwan, an issue which remains a major source of friction between the two countries. This follows Donald Trump's unprecedented acknowledgement that he had discussed the issue of weapon sales to Taiwan with President Ci in Beijing. But other causes of tension remain from US restrictions on the imports of Chinese EVs and on the exports of advanced chips to China to Beijing's dominance of the rare earth sector. So, how far can this latest summit between the two leaders go to resolving such concerns? Well, we're joined today by the historian of modern China, Professor Rana Mitt, former head of the China Center at Oxford University and now St. Lee chair in US Asia relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. Rana, thank you so much for talking to us on China in context. Now, Donald Trump has continued to speak positively about his relationship with Cining. Indeed, some analysts have suggested this summit was time to impress his voters ahead of the US midterm elections in November. But we've also just seen the passing of this new bill in Congress threatening sanctions against countries which import Russian oil as China does. We've seen a deal between Denmark and the US over Greenland, which Donald Trump has said will restrict Chinese and Russian expansion there. And we've also had an acknowledgement that the US has deployed weapons in space, something which has caused anxiety in China. So, how does all of this fit together with the two nations pledge to form this new stable and constructive relationship? >> I think what it points out, Duncan, is that it is still very much wet clay in terms of the way in which China policy is being constructed here in Washington. And no less than that, we should note that it's still pretty wet clay or perhaps the uh soft uh soil of the the Yellow River Valley on the China side as well where actually they're first of all looking to adapt to a fast changing set of American positions and also working out what they think is in their own most likely interest. So I would say that structurally some of the things you're talking about seem to be a product of what at least from the outside uh observers of Washington suggest is a variety of competing interests within the administration and then the kind of you know final chess master end of game uh checkmate move which I'll describe in a in in a moment. So in terms of the interests, first of all, one of the things that has been of most interest to China policy watchers in the last let's say 6 months or so is the rise in significance and heft and agenda setting of the Treasury Department and Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary in particular. I mean he was always someone who was obviously quite prominent within the the the current Trump administration, but his new centrality to China policy on questions of trade and also questions of technology. And we're talking of course about AI amongst other things there has been widely noticed >> because at the at the beginning of this Trump 2 administration it was very much Howard Lutnik the commerce secretary who seemed to be leading on all of the sanctions against China for example. >> Yes. And I think the commerce department of the secretary of commerce Howard Lutnik still you know very much has a voice in the game for what we can see. And as you say, a lot of the clamping down of very particular types of chip sales and so forth seem to have at least some of their origins in commerce. Also, of course, the figure who in other circumstances you might think would be more involved with China policy and to some extent is and that's of course Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio. And there's no question that obviously he has significant and important input into China questions and the state department continues to maintain a very important office of China coordination. And there are other areas which deal with that. But I think many people, you know, you don't need to know the world situation much to know that South America and the Middle East have been taking up a lot of oxygen. And so from that point of view, the shift towards a more Treasury Department, commercial, trade, and technologydriven argument about what to do next with China, I think is what we're seeing. And I mentioned that there's a sort of grandmaster kind of move at the end. Well, that of course is the president. That's Donald Trump who in the end will be the decider. Everyone agrees. They agree on nothing else. They agree that in the end what Trump wants the China policy to be will be the China policy. >> But as you say, I mean he he has also been fairly distracted by events in other parts of the world. Do you think that he he has really been focusing much on all of these issues that we just mentioned? things like uh how China would respond to the Russian oil sanctions or the Greenland deal or or the space weapons for example. I've read certainly from some reports that uh the Chinese side felt that the US hadn't hadn't really made a huge amount of preparation for this visit and it's all being done quite last minute really. >> My sense is that that absolutely is the Chinese reaction. It was the Chinese reaction as well to the May summit. But I think the American side, I would say that there are are two things they might say in response. First of all, you know, in a more freewheeling society and definitely a more freewheeling administration perhaps, you're not going to have the kind of minute-by-minute preparation that the Chinese authorities are obviously used to in pretty much everything they do. Whenever Xiinping makes a foreign visit to anywhere, it's going to be very heavily choreographed. It'll be worked out who will say what at what point. So I think the question of just different national styles is part of it and also different administrations. I think it's probably true [snorts] that some US administrations would have done more kind of sherper work as they sometimes call it. But I refer you back to what I was saying earlier. There are different interest groups it would appear within the administration who have different ideas of where to go. There are traditional national security hawks who you know warn that the most important issue in dealing with China is to deal with security and safety and infiltration and intelligence issues. Um national security council I think would fall in that category even now probably state department to some extent. The treasury and commerce departments are looking much more at trying to fulfill an agenda of the US economy needs to essentially rebalance in all sorts of ways including a trade deficit with China. What are we going to do about that? And right now, I think it's fair to say that the latter is probably a bit more where the president might be. People I've talked to who are closer to that world would say that of all the issues that insensim right now, the trade deficit with China is really the driver and therefore things that deal with that issue are central to it. That said, there's one other issue we're talking now about matters of the last, you know, few days. The AI question is something that is climbing up the domestic agenda in the United States. We have midterm elections coming up in early November. >> This is the question of whether there should be more regulation of AI because of all these concerns that have been expressed recently. >> That's right. Well, there's at least two things that um you know, I think nobody in January, you know, less than a year ago would have guessed would have occupied the midterms by the time we got to September, October, November. One of them is the question of AI regulation, which is now the most immediate issue. you know, are various versions of um AI, you know, leaping beyond their uh guardrails and and infiltrating each other and actually even before that over the summer, the growing concern over data centers and energy usage by data center. So, those are domestic US issues, but they're being tied up into an argument about China because when Trump is is asked, you know, why shouldn't we regulate? Why shouldn't we try and make this dangerous singing technology a bit safer? He says because then we'll lose to China. You know, I think his phrasing was whoever wins AI wins. That is very much, it seems, what he believes. I wouldn't bet against Xi Jinping these days believing that either. The Chinese AI proposition is a different one from the American or Western one. AI is already much more embedded in society. It's used in actually pretty forward- facing areas like healthcare. It's certainly almost certainly being used much more in the Chinese side in the military and other areas that we just don't know much about. But I think the idea that having a dominant AI structure is going to be one of the big tech arenas of the late 2020s and 2030s is now firmly held in the leadership in Beijing and Washington. The difference is that Beijing won't talk about it very openly. But um nonetheless, both sides now have a vested interest in trying to work out if there are meaningfully talks they can have between the two sides. And so going back to the summit, that's one of the things that's clearly, I think, going to be an area of significant interaction and discussion. Not in terms of, you know, that they're going to be able to decide what to do, but the agreement perhaps to have, as people sometimes say, talks about talks. That might be where if the US and China find that their next important area of interaction is and frankly, that will go probably beyond the end of the Trump presidency in a couple of years time. It will probably shape Xiinping, assuming he goes for a fourth term as general secretary, which seems likely. It will probably shape a great deal of his fourth term in terms of where China goes next as well. >> Cigin Ping has has made it clear that he does want China to be involved in setting the standards for AI. And I mean in the current climate, do you think there's any chance that the two sides can seriously find any common ground on these issues other than perhaps that neither Donald Trump nor CJ Pink seems to want too many other people telling them how their AI should be run? >> The likelihood that any entities I say entities rather than countries because the EU obviously would be one of the regulators as a kind of multi-ount country confederation. the idea that anyone except the Chinese and the Americans will talk to each other about these issues I think is becoming rapidly smaller and I think because the level of trust between the two sides is still very low really I mean this is about kind of rescuing a relationship that has been on very very stony ground uh I don't think people who are policymaking in Beijing have any reason to think that they have good lines of communication on a long-term level into the US I don't have a sense that there are Washington actors who have kind of deep and meaningful engagement with what's going on on the Chinese policy front. It often seems like something of a blank. [snorts] Having said that, I think we're at a kind of plateau area. The last summit, the one in May, seem to sort of put a floor under a variety of issues, including, you know, trade for the for the moment. And I think because the tech and AI issue has been accelerating so fast and so unpredictably, both sides feel they're on the back foot. So there are a couple of factors that may make it a slightly more positive environment for at least starting talks about talks or even talks about talks about talks. Number one is that I think there is an increasing sense of the urgency of working out whether the technology can be at least at some level regulated. I mean if not necessarily government regulation, [snorts] internal regulation. I think actually one area which hasn't necessarily been very prominent but may become important is private sector to private sector conversations. Uh clearly the CEOs of the big tech outfits in the US talking to the functional equivalents on the Chinese side will become more important and that I think actually does happen in many cases already. Now one could argue that because the Chinese side is obviously not going to do anything without consultation with the communist party you know clearly this is not a genuinely a separate sector of society on the other hand in the current environment it's clear that American industrial strategy is now much more tied up with what the state wants the US state wants as well and there's a sort of strange kind of interaction in which on the one hand the official position not least from vice president Vance is that the company should deciding these things for themselves. But the flip side of that is that nonetheless, the US government self-evidently has a very strong and active interest in working out where the private sector takes AI next, certainly in terms of being able to compete with China. So, private sector entrepreneurs and key actors could talk to each other with the knowledge that they have at least some channel conversation in each case back to their own governmental bodies and that might make a difference. Uh I'm not saying that's what's going to happen. [laughter] I'm saying that there are signs that that's already somewhere in the wider mix and we should sort of keep an eye out to see whether that particular channel perhaps goes further in a way that frankly getting two rooms full of diplomats or bureaucrats even presidents beyond a certain point just may not do. It's striking that there was expected to be a large Chinese industrial delegation coming with Cining reciprocally for the US tech leaders and other industrial leaders who went to China with Donald Trump in May which obviously included Jensen Hang from Nvidia and Tim Cook from Apple and Elon Musk. Of course, it was expected that Xiaomi and BYD and one of the other big battery companies CL and electronics companies like Highense and some of the car related companies would be coming with Cining. But there there were apparently had been suggestions according to some reports that Beijing had proposed that the business leaders should have their own roundt just between executives. But this was rejected by the White House. But but in the context of this tension over things like AI and of course the chips and there's constant twoing and throwing between China and the US over chips and which Nvidia chips can be exported to China for example that's been regulated and then relaxed and there's plenty of discussion about it still going on and then Huawei in China of course coming out with all of its own new products attempting to sort of get round these US sanctions and Huawei at the same time being sued in a criminal case in in New York at the moment accused of uh trying to copy robot technology from the US telecoms industry which they of course deny. You have all of these factors going on but do you think Donald Trump does have a clear vision on what what he wants to happen? You know in some cases he's actually been criticized by some in the US the more hawkish fraternity for being too lax on China in these areas. I think that in terms of a direction of travel and a kind of end goal, what Donald Trump likely wants and again I cannot speak for uh you know the uh intentions of the president of the United States. I don't think there's necessarily a huge secret about it. I mean he's had an idea for a very long time and it's called MAGA make America great again and that's the vision I think and if the arena for greatness whatever that is is technological I was going to say superiority but let's use the word dominance because you know I think that that's not out of place here that's what it would be now what is the arena in which technology would be dominant you know 25 years ago it would have been owning the internet well if AI and many people you know obviously many people who have shared prices to protect making this case. That doesn't necessarily mean it's untrue. If the next arena is basically AI and its applications, then I think Donald Trump wants the United States to be the one and only ideally dominant actor in that arena. And if China is to be a player and you know let's be frank the way things are going it absolutely will be then he wants it to be number two and a player that in some ways is still derivative of what happens in the US. Now if you look at the reality of where we are right now uh midepptember 2026 that's not an inaccurate description of where it is now. You can see a sort of hinge point moment in which the US AI sector is highly valued although with a valuation that has fragility in it. uh still largely driven by closed systems famously um and still for the moment a significant period of time not unbeatable but significant period of time ahead in terms of of of development um and with an innovation capacity at the kind of blue sky level that China doesn't yet rival. China on the other hand has scale. It has the capacity capacity to take existing US technology and make it more than the sum of its parts. the phenomenon of distillation which a lot of listeners will have heard about in which basically China you know draws on huge numbers of sources from around the world including the United States and kind of uh essentially orients them into Chinese openweight models that essentially drive more traffic in the direction of of China. In other words, from truly open-source models that anyone can take and adapt to ones that actually the intellectual property remains in China, but the capacity to use them is disseminated and diffused elsewhere. So, you can see already different sorts of commercial and technological ecologies emerging. >> I mean, of course, the US has criticized China and accused it of of copying its AI models via this process of distillation. >> Oh, sure. And in a literal sense that that's true. The problem is that we've seen with so many other technologies that this happens in Britain a great deal as well that blue skies invention is still often much much more productive certainly in the US and sometimes in Western Europe as well. You know you think of the smartphone we think of the the battery EVs um lithium batteries and so the vast majority of these things are invented from first principle in the US or elsewhere in the in the liberal world. But what China always has been able to do in the last you know 30 or 40 years is to take the existing technology whether purchasing it through a joint venture or simply by putting a thumb drive into a laptop somewhere you know whatever the method may be take the framing the technology and then make it faster, cheaper, larger scale sometimes more effective and then reorient that back into commercially scalable capacity. So, China didn't invent the uh basis of solar and wind technology, but it dominates in those sectors. China didn't invent AI either, but it knows an awful lot about how to produce it, scale it. Uh it has brands which are beginning to come up on the outside that have global resonance in terms of LLMs and chatbots, Deep See, Kimmy, whole variety of names that people know. I mean, a lot of people are saying that one of the things that may end up tripping up China is not necessarily to do with the lack of technology, but the lack of compute or indeed the lack of energy provision. And that's one of the reasons why it's finding all sorts of new projects from driving hydroelectric power in the west of China to actually working out ways in which simply it can dominate the market for compute in and outside China to be able to drive those models. Uh so you know looking at the areas in which both sides are seeking to uh essentially overcome resource constraints may be the most interesting question of the next 3 6 12 months. >> We've obviously saw that during this visit by Donald Trump to China in in the spring that the the two sides said that they were going to set up these a board of trade and a board of commerce that would sort of help to create a framework for trade disputes in the future. And of course some and some scholars I believe argued that the introduction of what was called the constructive relationship of strategic stability which many people felt was sounded very much like a a Chinese government type idea just in terms of the language that was used that this would make it much harder for Donald Trump in particular to spring sudden sanctions on China. Do you think that there is despite all of these tensions over issues like a AI and uh chips that there is there is any greater sense now that the two sides are at least going to find some way of coexisting in these areas? You know, is is that what these frameworks actually could lead to? or was it really a a way for the two countries to just sort of shove their differences and just get on with their own targets over the next couple of years, which for China obviously includes becoming self- sustainable in technology? >> Well, the honest answer is that none of us know yet. Uh because a lot of this architecture, if you want to put it that way, is changing very fast with the board of trade and board of commerce. I genuinely don't know. I I mean I heard talk like many people um back in I want to say May June when that was being talked about a lot. I haven't heard a lot about them since maybe they're in process and then there'll be more. The most recent piece of trade news I mean within the last 48 hours as we record this was as you said earlier in this conversation about the new tariff hammer as some people are calling it based on Russia sanctions that the United States meaning the president can use if he wants to punish countries that buy you know Russian oil and fossil fuels. The biggest buyers of that Russian oil are number one China, number two India, number three I think is Turkey, number four is a kind of concatenation of EU countries. So, are you going to put sanctions on China? I don't think so. Can you put them on India? Well, actually, the Trump administration did sort of do this about half a year ago and uh the Indians not unreasonably said, well, if you don't like us buying Russian oil, why aren't you sanctioning the Chinese? And the real answer is because then they'll stop us getting critical minerals. But of course, they couldn't say that. So, in other words, what that tariff hammer is for in terms of the sanctions is unclear. I think it'll be un unlikely to worry the Chinese too much in that case. In terms of the wider environment, I mean, I think one thing that at the the summit yet again the Chinese will push a bit on is language on Taiwan. We had a bit of that in in May. But I think that they are now from what I can tell so driven by vibes as well as policies. The vibe being that they are thinking more and more that actually Taiwan status will change at some point in the nearish future. There have been sort of discussions on blogs and other places about this and one of the issues is whether or not they are able to influence a possibly already febrile domestic Taiwan political situation around the 2028 January election. Clearly the election of a non DPV president of some variety would serve the aim of opening up negotiations over whatever there is to talk about. One of the things that did appear to come out of Donald Trump's visit to China in the in May was that Beijing had apparently pledged to buy 200 Boeing jets and but also that it would start buying more soybeans again, which it had used as a a retaliation for American sanctions and had been buying more of them from Brazil and South America, that it was going to buy more American beef and poultry and things that it had limited in the past. I don't know how substantive that has turned out to be, but obviously you raised this issue of China having great leverage because of its dominance now of the rare earths and minerals uh sectors. >> Is there a feeling in the US that Donald Trump for all of his gung-ho rhetoric towards China early in his second term has now had to cool that down? and and you know he has been criticized by some hawks perhaps for being not as hard on China as they would hope. I mean we've seen all these congressional committees and hearings over the last couple of weeks in the run-up to see Jinping's visit. Some of them calling for the release of Jimmy Lie in Hong Kong, the the jailed newspaper tycoon. Others calling for the release of other dissident, for the administration to take a tougher stance on human rights. Is there a sense that Trump got anything substantive out of his trip to Beijing? And how is all of this playing with his traditional base among among US voters and politicians? >> I think the best way I can answer it actually is fairly concisely, which is that as someone who's, you know, currently living in the United States, looking at what is on people's minds at the moment, China is a backburner issue in US politics at the moment. As far as I can tell, it hasn't always been. Sometimes it's been very prominent at least because you know the president and his opponents have have brought it up. Uh [snorts] it's still a very important policy issue but in terms of in terms of setting the political world al light it's very much about domestic economic politics. Uh the Iran war continues to be something that obviously is you know burning in the background but um China negotiations are not really something that animates much of the politics at the moment. people running for office for the Senate or the Congress at the moment don't seem to be pushing the China issue, whatever that would be. So, in that sense, I think we're actually in a moment, maybe that's good, where the two governments are going to be talking to each other about what's on their minds and perhaps, as you say, not going much beyond a few sort of slightly milk toast uh trade agreements here and there. maybe agreements, talks about talks about talks on AI, some perhaps, you know, slightly ambivalent language about Taiwan. You know, these are going to be more the things of an inside conversation than something that really animates US politics at the moment. >> And you mentioned the issue of Taiwan and you also mentioned Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, who of of course before he joined the administration was famous for his hawkish attitude towards China, particularly in the context of Taiwan. you know, was seen as a great supporter of Taiwan. Now, we saw that when President Trump was in Beijing in May that he said that he had discussed arm sales to Taiwan with Cining, something which many people saw as an unusual acknowledgement at least, and also that he was quoted as having listened to Cining and said, you know, we don't want to have someone in Taiwan who's going to try and go independent because the US is selling them weapons packages. and they put a major weapons package, you know, these go through regularly to Taiwan, but they put a major package worth, I think, 14 billion US dollars on hold. And there's now the question of whether that will be further delayed in an attempt to sort of appease Cining. >> Well, that also has to do with whether it would get through the Taiwan legislative UN as well because actually the domestic consensus for particularly the opposition KMT uh for putting it through is not necessarily that. >> Absolutely. I mean, obviously it's controversial in within Taiwan politics as well, but there was some blowback in the US when all of this first came out in May when President Trump was in China with some people really accusing him of of selling out Taiwan. How is that playing now? And is that still a very live issue or, you know, as you say, is that also just on the back burner >> in terms of shaping the conversation of US politics and international relations? It's really pretty back burner. I mean I I can't stress how much at least in this country if people are thinking about international politics they are thinking about Iran because it's having a very direct effect specifically on gas prices. People are paying more for gasoline. They're paying more for diesel. And again if you talk about even at the next level up of international partnerships and the difficulties that are being caused there I think a lot of the Gulf countries Saudi uh Gata um Oman and so forth their perception is that an Iranian regime has now been embedded rather than defeated and can now control the straits of through the Houthis can control the Baband that oil supplies from there to much of the rest of the world including China are potentially uh problematic or or worse than that these are the sorts of conversations that people are having at the moment. Just again something that seems in some ways unconnected but I think really isn't um as we speak some sort of agreement seems to made between the US and Denmark and Greenland on arrangement there and it's one that's been touted as giving the US you know kind of long-term security looks remarkably the same security guarantees that they had under NATO agreements. In fact, the point being that there may be I have no insight info, but there may be a decision that getting into another row about Greenland now at the same time the Middle East is not sorted is not worth it. And they're coming up with a deal where you can declare victory and go home on Greenland is useful. And the same may be true in China and even on Taiwan issues that basically saying it's all fine, we've won and taking that off the news agenda may be a key decision at a time when unfortunately the Middle East question can't be wiped away in quite the same way because its day-to-day effects in terms of those gas prices at the pump are still very visible to everyday voters. Do you think that China feels that it did make significant progress in terms of Taiwan or at least in terms of perhaps influencing Donald Trump's thinking on Taiwan during that last visit? I mean, is Beijing, as some analysts have suggested, basically sort of satisfied that it's more or less got as much as it can from the US on Taiwan for the time being and that this issue won't be such a huge part of the talks this time round? >> It probably won't be such a huge part. Yeah, I I think that broadly speaking, they'll have thought that they're getting pretty much what they're going to get. It's certainly not, you know, as confrontational position as it was, you know, maybe during the middle of the Biden administration even. However, I think that they will also be doing a bit of, you know, double or quitsing in terms of thinking where to go next. Because if you believe that Trump is as good as it gets in terms of taking a an unconventional view of the US asurances towards Taiwan, then you probably do want to get back in and see if you can push to something that is outside what have been the norms in terms of of a deal because, you know, that's kind of what Trump does. And if you're China, you know that perfectly well. You may also think that it's possible that the next president of the United States, if it's Vice President Vance becoming president, may be even less inclined to get involved in the outside world. Or you could think, but the next president might be Marco Rubio, or it might be a more traditional Democrat or it might be someone else completely. And those people may decide that actually a more traditional position on Taiwan from the United States should be restored. At which point if you're Beijing, you may have thought well actually we probably should have pushed Trump harder. So you have to decide whether that's your moment now and whether you'll get anything from it or whether actually you just decide to work with as I mentioned before that wider sense that overall Taiwan's situation globally is being narrowed and therefore actually what you really need to do is just to keep pushing and wait and change the facts on the water and the facts on the ground. And going back to some of the sort of nitty-gritty issues, is it your expectation that the current trade truce as it were over tariffs and and so on will just be extended? There's been talk of some deal that the two sides would each reduce tariffs on $30 billion worth of of goods. I don't know whether that's a sign that the US is actually realizing it does need some cheaper Chinese imports after all. But uh again, this seemed to be a huge issue for much of 2025 and now does feel like it's it's much lower profile. So are they able to somehow push some of these issues to the side for the moment? >> Yeah, my my bet because I think the uh current agreement was for a year in October of 2025 and we're coming up to October 2026 now. So it'll be decided within a few weeks anyway. Um is basically probably push the button on same thing again. you know, maybe put it in for two years rather than for for a while or whatever. But, you know, they they'll they'll decide that. I don't have a sense there's any appetite either in Beijing or Washington for a new trade war. And the reasons on the American side are obvious. We kind of discussed them a little bit with the the midterms. Let me just stress something on the China side. My last trip a few weeks ago, I was a bit takenback by how downhearted everyone I talked to, this could be, you know, academics, ivory tower or otherwise, could be, you know, business entrepreneurs, could be DD drivers, uh, you know, people driving their ride share cabs, saying that they just felt economically on the downturn. They did not feel that things were sparking up. They didn't feel the domestic economy was creating opportunities for them. Uh, if it was the entrepreneurs, they seemed, you know, nervous about investing. Of course, China has, as you know, one economic factor that is very different from the US and and the others, even though some of the gloom is the same. The different factor, of course, is deflation, uh, which sounds like it's great in terms of prices until you experience it, at which point actually investment and purchases tend to shrink because everyone sort of assumes the prices will go down further. And that's particularly true, of course, with the horrific deflation in property prices with all those people who have mortgages bought at the height of the property boom and have properties [clears throat] that they can neither service nor sell. So that factor is, I suspect, very much on Chinese policy makers minds. And the idea that you would then make it worse with a massive trade crisis is clearly very unpalatable. And at the same time, as I've said, I don't think anyone I know in Washington is very keen to decide that the best thing to do is to kind of get tariff rates going up and have another USChina trade war. There's been some discussion about whether there could be any significant change from the US side in terms of attitudes to Chinese EVs which at the moment have these huge tariffs basically are unaffordable for people in the US whereas they're making rapid strides into Europe and certainly in the UK but uh there's been some suggestions that Trump might at least be encourage thinking of encouraging China to start manufacturing EVs within the US. We're seeing obviously these battery makers from China who are so dominant coming on this trip with CGMPing. Is that an area where you think there could be any significant change or is is the need to protect the US auto industry still too great really >> for the moment? I'd be surprised about a move going in that direction. I I've talked to some of the people involved with negotiations. The way that they phrased their frustration with the Europeans was, "You may want to allow the Chinese to come and basically hollow out your auto industry. We're not going to allow that to happen in in the United States." I think it will be difficult for the US to do that in quite that form. partly because well there there are a variety of reasons but I think that because the North American auto market has been so integrated until now with Mexico and Canada and because relations with Canada in particular at the moment are an extremely dubious state. the trust environment which actually you would have to have between Canadian and US and indeed Mexican leaders to reimagine the North American auto manufacturing environment with Chinese investment and Chinese IP in particular involved in it in a central way. I just don't see how politically that works at the moment. And just one last question, you raised this idea of the the kind of debates on AI will, you know, continuing way beyond, for example, Donald Trump's presidency. Do you think that Beijing is really now looking at the world beyond Donald Trump? I mean, are they sort of thinking, we've only got a couple more years of of this guy to go and we're not going to let him interfere with our sort of longerterm strategy? >> Yes, I think so. I mean, I think that there's still plenty of attention, how could there not be, on Donald Trump and what he's up to? Because I think in the very short term, they are still working out, are there things that we can attain while he holds the presidency that just may not be possible with any other president of any other party. But the basic premise of China's engagement with the United States, which I think has really been true for perhaps 25 years or or so, is that the United States will not be a partner for China. You know, [clears throat] the two will be in competition. I I remember speaking to a senior Chinese military figure, I know a couple of years ago, who said that he thought that the central question really of geopolitics was whether or not the US or China could avoid conflict. And I'm sure you'll find many on the US side saying something similar. So in that context, China has considered and will consider any US leader to at the very least be a competitor, a rival to China. And I don't think, you know, even Donald Trump steps back from that idea. You know, he wants a competition that is perhaps more economic. Uh he's not interested perhaps, I'm sure he's not interested in a a kind of military confrontation if he can avoid it. But Europe, Japan, South Korea have been much more surprised by the developments of the last two years because I think they really did not perceive that a US president would essentially cast them as adversaries. Canada too. China is not remotely surprised to be cast in that particular mode and therefore to that extent any president even Donald Trump is sort of a variation on a theme as far as they're concerned. If the next president were to be Vance, Rubio, Gavin News, I suspect, uh, whoever it might be, they will still regard that person as someone who has the containment, the constraining of China as a key geopolitical goal, even though their methods or their language may be different. >> Well, Rana emitter, thank you so much for joining us on China in Context. >> Huge pleasure to be with you, Duncan. Look forward to the next time. Well, that's all we have time for on this episode. You can find out more about Soaz China Institute events on our website, sosas.ac.uk. But for now, thanks for listening and goodbye.