Peter Harrell

President Trump attended a summit in Beijing where he and Chinese leader Xi Jinping exchanged rhetoric about opening China's markets to American corporations, echoing language from the 1990s-2000s era of US-China engagement. However, the article notes this nostalgia masks a fundamental shift: the two countries are now structural antagonists competing for dominance in transformative technologies like AI and quantum computing, with Trump's administration building managed trade systems rather than pursuing genuine market opening.