Trump-Xi 2026 Summit: Susan Thornton on the Stakes for Tech, Trade, and Taiwan

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]China's made very clear that they're not that interested in a G2 or a grand bargain. They've said in you know, private conversations that they don't expect big movement on the Taiwan issue. And I think they generally have pretty low expectations for the list of substantive outcomes, what we call the deliverables in the US government, but they do have expectations about the symbolic and subs you know, kind of the symbolic signal that it will send that the two are meeting and and having some good conversations. Um, having been involved in some trade negotiations with China over the years, I think the biggest problem for US negotiators is focusing in on two or three enduring and major asks of the Chinese in the trade and economic sort of market opening space.

[00:00:52]Um, we've really had a hard time trying to decide what it is that we want from China, and we tend to give them a long list of revolving priorities, which you know, if you're on the other side of that negotiating table, it's very easy to just fob them off and not actually commit to anything over years of negotiations. On the tech piece, I just think that it's going to be very hard for the US to contain China's technological ambitions and growth. I don't think that we're exactly competing on the same metrics. I question how it is that we're going to be able to keep China from getting technologies that are dual use, but might be useful in some military application when these things are basically economy-wide products.