"Constructive Strategic Stability": Ali Wyne of the International Crisis Group on the Trump-Xi Summit

Welcome to the Cineca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Gua coming to you this week from my soon-to-be on-the-market home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a National Resource Center for the Study of East Asia. Listeners, you can support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at Seneca Podcast.com. Please do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations. So I'm taping this just a little over a day after President Trump's plane left Chinese airspace, wrapping up a state visit that included many hours of direct engagement with Chinese President Xi Jinping. It was bad timing on my part that I wasn't there in Beijing for the summit, so I could, you know, maybe give you guys a better sense of Chinese reactions to it and how it felt on the ground, but hey, I did pay as much attention to it as I was able to from here.

It wasn't exactly Nixon goes to China in 1972. There weren't major breakthroughs, no eye-wateringly large trade or investment deals signed yet, or announced yet anyway, no board of investment announced, no dramatic changes in the American position on Taiwan that I can tell. No pledge secured for China to help the US out of its jam in Iran and get the Strait of Hormuz open. After the first day the two sides produced parallel readouts that that read, as more than one observer had noted, like accounts of two very different meetings. Perhaps there's still more to come, but so far the deliverables list, as everyone has noted, is rather thin.

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