The US-China Grand Bargain May Have Just Begun

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]Something historic happened this morning, and most people watching the news coverage completely missed what it actually means. Donald Trump landed in Beijing. He walked out of his limousine, one that was physically flown in from the United States aboard a military transport aircraft, and he met with President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People. The last time an American president set foot in Beijing was 9 years ago, in November 2017. That visit ended badly. It planted the seeds of a trade war that has been grinding on for almost a decade, reshaping global supply chains, kicking off a technology arms race, and contributing to the worst period of US-China relations since the Nixon era. So, why is Trump back? And why does this visit feel so radically different? Because of who came with him.

[00:00:51]Trump didn't just bring diplomats. He didn't just bring his cabinet, though Marco Rubio as Secretary of State was there, and so was the Secretary of Defense. He brought Elon Musk of Tesla, Tim Cook of Apple, Boeing's leadership trying to close a $50 billion aircraft deal with Chinese airlines. He brought Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, executives from Citigroup, MasterCard, and Visa. If you add up the market capitalization of the companies represented in that room, you're looking at over $12 trillion of corporate America sitting across the table from Beijing. Here's something I want you to understand from the beginning, and this comes from someone who has sat in serious business negotiations.

[00:01:42]You do not gather people this powerful, this busy, this expensive to get to the same room unless you are about to announce a mega deal. These people do not fly to China for photo opportunities. They fly to China when contracts are being signed. My prediction, and we will know within days whether I'm right, is that by the time the summit concludes, we will see the broad contours of what I'm going to call the US-China grand bargain. A foundational agreement where two nations that have been fighting each other economically for nearly a decade begin a new chapter, one where they do not merely stop fighting, but start cooperating to stabilize the global economy together.

[00:02:30]What I want to do in this lecture is explain three things: how we got here, why this grand bargain will happen, and what it will actually look like. Before we get into the substance, let me clear something up.

[00:02:43]Because the last month of headlines has been bewildering, and if you have been trying to make sense of it by following the news cycle, you've been looking at shadows on a wall.

[00:02:54]Let's walk through what happened in the weeks leading up to this summit.

[00:02:59]China blocked Manas, an AI company that Mark Zuckerberg wanted to acquire.

[00:03:05]Manas was incubated in China, and when it became successful enough to attract American capital, Beijing said, "No, you stay here."

[00:03:15]This was framed as a shot in the AI war between the two superpowers.

[00:03:21]The United States imposed sanctions on Chinese companies doing business with Iran, targeting satellite companies selling commercial intelligence about US military bases, and so-called teapot refineries converting Iranian oil into energy China can use.

[00:03:40]China responded with something called a blocking order, telling its own citizens that if you comply with American sanctions, we will sanction you.

[00:03:51]That had never happened before. Nvidia was blocked from selling its most advanced chips into the Chinese market.

[00:03:58]There were naval war games in the Philippines. China sent 28 warships.

[00:04:04]Iran's foreign minister visited Beijing.

[00:04:07]Putin is scheduled to arrive in Beijing the day after Trump leaves.

[00:04:11]If you look at all of this on the surface, it looks like escalation. It looks like two powers sliding toward confrontation.

[00:04:19]I want to argue that it is theater. Not theater in the sense that nothing is real. The sanctions are real, the warships are real, the blocked chip sales are real.

[00:04:29]Theater in the sense that none of it is the actual story. None of it is where the real negotiation is happening. All of it is positioning, leverage being established, signals being sent, pressure being applied in service of a negotiation that both sides already know they need to complete. The real story is not the conflict. The real story is the deal. To understand why, we need to go back further. We need to understand not just the last month, but the last 50 years. The Trump visit to Beijing today is, in terms of historical significance, directly analogous to Nixon's visit in 1972. Most people know that Nixon went to China and that it was a big deal.

[00:05:12]Fewer people understand why. Before 1972, the United States had refused to recognize the People's Republic of China as a legitimate government for over two decades. America's position was that the nationalist government, Chiang Kai-shek's KMT, which had fled to Taiwan after losing the Chinese Civil War, was the real government of China. The US refused to do business with the mainland, supported Taiwan's claim to represent all of China, and maintained a posture of outright hostility toward Beijing. Nixon's visit shattered 20 years of American foreign policy in a single trip. Historians tend to explain this through the lens of geopolitics.

[00:05:56]Henry Kissinger's famous triangulation strategy.

[00:06:00]The idea that by cozying up to China, America could drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow and gain an advantage in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

[00:06:13]That's a satisfying narrative.

[00:06:15]It's also, I would argue, incomplete.

[00:06:18]The real reason Nixon went to China was the Nixon shock of 1971.

[00:06:24]In August of 1971, Nixon unilaterally removed the US dollar from the gold standard.

[00:06:32]Before that moment, every dollar in circulation was theoretically backed by physical gold. You could take a dollar to the US Treasury and exchange it for a fixed quantity of gold.

[00:06:44]After the Nixon shock, that was gone.

[00:06:47]The dollar was now backed by nothing.

[00:06:50]It was, in a very literal sense, a piece of paper whose value rested entirely on collective belief.

[00:06:58]If you are running the world's reserve currency and that currency is suddenly backed by nothing, you have a serious problem. You need to create demand for that currency by other means. You need to make the entire world need dollars, not because dollars can be redeemed for gold, but because dollars are required to participate in the global economy.

[00:07:20]Nixon's solution was elegant and audacious. It had two components. The first was the petrodollar. Nixon negotiated an arrangement with Saudi Arabia and subsequently with the broader Gulf states whereby oil would only be sold in US dollars. Overnight, the dollar was no longer backed by gold, it was backed by oil. And since the entire world runs on oil, the entire world now needed dollars. The second component was China. The strategy was to transform China into the manufacturing base of the global economy. China would produce goods, the world would buy those goods, the transactions would be denominated in dollars. China would accumulate dollars.

[00:08:02]And to accumulate dollars, China would have to continuously participate in and sustain the US dollar denominated global financial system.

[00:08:13]These two pillars, petrodollar and China as manufacturer, became the foundation of the world economy we have lived in for the past 50 years. Now I want to introduce a framework for understanding all of this.

[00:08:28]And I want to be transparent that this is my own interpretation, my own theory.

[00:08:33]Question it, challenge it, but try to follow the logic because once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

[00:08:41]Think about Plato's allegory of the cave.

[00:08:45]You have a group of people chained inside a cave facing a blank wall.

[00:08:50]Behind them is a fire.

[00:08:52]And between the fire and the people, unseen figures cast shadows onto the wall.

[00:08:59]The prisoners see only the shadows.

[00:09:02]They have never seen the fire, never seen the real objects.

[00:09:07]So they build their entire understanding of reality around those shadows.

[00:09:13]The shadows become real to them.

[00:09:15]They name them, develop mythology around them, argue about their meaning.

[00:09:21]Now apply this to the global economy.

[00:09:24]The American empire is the cave.

[00:09:27]The structure that forces you to sit and watch the wall. The financial elite, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, the City of London, private capital are the ones casting the shadows.

[00:09:40]The [snorts] mechanism they use is the US dollar, and around this mechanism they have built a set of institutions, the UN, the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, that appear to be neutral, international, impartial, but which are in practice controlled by those casting the shadows.

[00:09:58]To sustain the illusion, you need media, education, and culture to make people believe the shadows are real. And then you need legal systems, social norms, and enforcement mechanisms to punish those who deviate from the shared hallucination.

[00:10:14]This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a description of how power works. Power is not primarily physical force. It is the capacity to direct and shape collective attention, to make people see what you want them to see, to make the hallucination feel like reality. Now, here is the crucial part. When Nixon removed the dollar from gold, he needed to create two new hallucinations to replace the one he destroyed. Those two hallucinations are the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, the petrodollar system, and China. What does it mean for China to be a hallucination of a hallucination?

[00:10:55]It means that China's economic reality, the RMB, the factories, the export machine, the wealth, all of it is ultimately grounded in the US dollar.

[00:11:05]The RMB has value because it can be exchanged for dollars. China's manufacturing has value because it sells to a world that pays in dollars. China's entire economic identity was conjured into existence by the American financial system, not by Chinese ingenuity alone, not by Chinese sovereignty alone, but by a deliberate decision made in Washington in 1972 to outsource manufacturing to the Chinese mainland and use that manufacturing to create demand for the dollar. This has three important consequences. First, China has structural limits on genuine creativity and innovation because a hallucination of a hallucination has nothing of its own to stand on.

[00:11:52]This is a harsh claim, but look at the evidence. Huawei's most celebrated innovation was largely derived from copy Apple's intellectual property. China's tech sector has been brilliant at iteration and execution, less so at foundational creation. Second, wealth generated inside China flows back toward its source.

[00:12:16]Wealthy Chinese know at some level that the renminbi is downstream of the dollar.

[00:12:22]So, when they have the opportunity, they convert their savings into dollars, into dollar-denominated real estate, into assets inside the American system.

[00:12:31]Capital flight is not an anomaly. It is a predictable feature of the architecture.

[00:12:37]Third, China is more fragile than it appears precisely because it is a copy of something that is itself fragile. If the original hallucination, the dollar system, comes under severe stress, China doesn't just get destabilized. China gets destabilized first and fastest.

[00:12:57]Once you understand this framework, the trade war that began in 2018 takes on a very different meaning. When China joined the World Trade Organization in 1999, it agreed to two conditions that America demanded. First, protect intellectual property. Honor the patents and copyrights of foreign companies operating in China. Second, open the financial sector. Allow renminbi to be convertible into other currencies, specifically dollars, creating what economists call full capital account convertibility. China agreed to these conditions in principle. It never fully honored either of them. On intellectual property, Chinese companies with varying degrees of government complicity, routinely absorbed foreign technology without adequate compensation. Huawei is the most visible example. By 2016, Huawei smartphones were genuinely competitive with and in some respects superior to Apple products. They were cheaper, faster improving, and built on a manufacturing base that had learned from the best IP in the world.

[00:14:04]The United States response was to sanction Huawei. Not because China broke the rules, but because the rules weren't being enforced and the consequences were becoming commercially intolerable.

[00:14:17]On financial openness, China simply could not afford to comply.

[00:14:22]If China fully opened its capital account, if any Chinese citizen could freely convert Renminbi into dollars, the result would be predictable and catastrophic.

[00:14:32]Every wealthy Chinese person would immediately convert their savings into dollars. Capital would flood out of the country.

[00:14:41]The banking system would collapse. The economy would implode.

[00:14:45]Beijing understood this perfectly, which is why full convertibility never happened.

[00:14:51]America's frustration with these broken promises on IP and on financial openness is what drove the trade war. When Trump came to power in 2016, he looked at the trade deficit with China and said, "This is a bad deal."

[00:15:06]And while his analysis was crude, he missed the larger architecture, his instinct that something was structurally wrong was not entirely incorrect.

[00:15:17]The trade war itself accelerated China's internal contradictions.

[00:15:23]Consumer confidence, which had survived the initial tariffs reasonably well, was shattered by COVID and never recovered.

[00:15:31]Chinese are saving 40% of their income, the highest household savings rate in the world, not because they are prudent, but because they are anxious. They don't believe the economy is doing well. They don't see a promising future. And those with the means, especially highly educated young people, are leaving.

[00:15:53]Each year, roughly a million Chinese students go abroad to study, and the best among them do not return. They stay in the West. They find their way back to the source. Now, here's the pivot.

[00:16:07]Because all of that dysfunction, all of that accumulated savings, all of that unexploited capital, is precisely what makes China irresistible to Wall Street.

[00:16:19]Think about it from the perspective of BlackRock or Blackstone.

[00:16:23]China has the highest household savings rate in the world. Chinese families are sitting on vast piles of cash inside state-controlled banks earning minimal returns.

[00:16:35]The Chinese capital account is closed, meaning that money cannot easily leave.

[00:16:40]It is locked in.

[00:16:41]And the Chinese financial system is underdeveloped. China invests less abroad relative to the size of its economy than Mexico, Indonesia, Turkey, or Brazil. Countries with a fraction of China's economic weight are more integrated into global financial markets.

[00:17:00]From a Wall Street perspective, China is the last great untapped financial frontier. The strategy is to financialize China, to open that locked pool of savings to global financial instruments, to use the Chinese economy as collateral for global financial operations, to sell investment products and financial services to Chinese consumers and Chinese institutions. This is why those executives are in Beijing right now. This is not about trade balances or tariff schedules. It is about access, financial access. The right to sell stocks, bonds, insurance products, and wealth management services to 1.4 billion people who are currently saving 40% of their income with nowhere interesting to put it. Let me explain the specific mechanism by which this integration is supposed to happen.

[00:17:55]Because it connects directly to something happening right now in Washington.

[00:18:01]The United States currently carries approximately 39 trillion dollars in national debt.

[00:18:08]The interest rate on that debt is around 5%.

[00:18:12]That means the US government owes roughly 2 trillion dollars in interest payments per year.

[00:18:20]Money it can only obtain by borrowing more, which increases the debt, which increases the interest payments.

[00:18:28]It is a structurally unsustainable spiral.

[00:18:32]The traditional solution to sovereign debt problems is financial repression.

[00:18:38]You lower interest rates to near zero, which reduces the interest burden, and you allow inflation to slowly erode the real value of the debt over decades.

[00:18:50]The problem is that if you lower the interest rate on US Treasuries to zero, no rational investor will buy them.

[00:18:59]They will find higher yielding alternatives.

[00:19:03]Unless you force them to buy. Here is where stablecoins come in. You may have heard of Tether and Circle, the two largest dollar denominated stablecoins.

[00:19:13]These are digital currencies pegged one-to-one to the US dollar, and they're backed by US Treasury bonds. To issue a stablecoin, the issuer must first purchase US Treasuries. This creates mandatory demand for Treasuries, regardless of the interest rate.

[00:19:32]Now, the US Congress is currently advancing two pieces of legislation, the Genius Act and the Clarity Act. These bills would regulate stablecoins and require that all stablecoins be backed by US government securities. In other words, if you want to issue digital dollars, you must buy American debt. The genius of this mechanism, if you'll forgive the pun, is what it does to the closed Chinese capital account. Right now, Chinese citizens cannot freely convert RMB into US dollars. That's the closed capital account. But, stablecoins are not US dollars in the traditional legal sense. They're digital instruments, and digital instruments can be sold to Chinese consumers through platforms like Apple Pay, through financial apps, through fintech companies that operate in China. So, the pathway looks like this. A Chinese citizen with RMB savings buys a stablecoin. The stablecoin issuer uses those RMB proceeds to purchase US Treasuries. The US debt burden shifts, slowly, onto the balance sheets of Chinese savers. The capital account is effectively bypassed without being formally opened.

[00:20:45]China's 40% savings rate, that enormous pool of trapped capital, becomes the funding source for American debt at artificially low interest rates. That is the deal.

[00:20:56]That is why BlackRock and Visa and MasterCard are in Beijing. Now, you might be asking the obvious question, why on earth would China agree to this?

[00:21:06]The answer is that China is in a weaker position than most people realize and it has concrete needs that only the United States can satisfy. Start with energy.

[00:21:17]China consumes roughly twice as much energy as America for its manufacturing and export operations. It sources 50 to 60% of that energy from the Middle East, specifically from flows that pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Right now, there is an active conflict in the Middle East that has disrupted those flows. At the same time, America has effectively extended its influence over Venezuela and Trump has openly floated the idea of making Venezuela the 51st state. South America was where China was building an extensive network of infrastructure projects, ports, railways, pipelines to secure an alternative energy supply chain. America just blocked that route. China can turn to Russia for energy and it will buy more Russian oil.

[00:22:05]But China does not want to become entirely dependent on Russia.

[00:22:10]Beijing sees itself as a third pole of global power, not an American client, but also not a Russian satellite.

[00:22:19]The geopolitical logic of complete energy dependence on Moscow is repugnant to Chinese policy makers. So China needs a deal with America that secures stable, affordable energy from the Western Hemisphere.

[00:22:35]America controls that access. America can grant it.

[00:22:40]And from China's perspective, forget the sovereignty questions, forget the moral arguments. If America guarantees stable energy at a fair price, that is a better arrangement than dealing with a dozen corrupt governments across South America and Africa individually. Then there is Taiwan. The conventional wisdom is that Taiwan is the one issue that could send the US and China to war.

[00:23:06]But look at it from the American side with clear eyes. Taiwan is strategically valuable because it sits in the first island chain, the arc of islands that constrains Chinese naval expansion into the Pacific.

[00:23:20]But if you transfer Taiwan to Chinese sovereignty, what happens?

[00:23:24]Taiwan does not become strategically irrelevant. It becomes a Chinese asset that now blocks Japanese and South Korean access to Southeast Asian shipping lanes.

[00:23:36]Suddenly, Tokyo and Seoul face an existential strategic problem.

[00:23:41]Suddenly, Japan and South Korea have every incentive to rearm dramatically, demand American security guarantees, or pursue nuclear deterrence.

[00:23:53]The Taiwan problem, in other words, does not disappear. It gets transferred from America's balance sheet to Japan and South Korea's, which is why it may make perfect strategic sense for Trump to change American policy on Taiwan, to move from strategic ambiguity to something closer to tacit acceptance of eventual reunification. In exchange for a grand bargain, America offloads one of its most costly strategic commitments and forces its Pacific allies to confront their own security calculations. Finally, there are semiconductors and artificial intelligence. China desperately needs Nvidia chips. It needs high-end semiconductors to build the data centers that fuel AI development. America has been blocking those sales. The sudden appearance of Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, on Air Force One as Trump flew through Alaska to refuel after his name had been conspicuously absent from the delegation list, tells you everything.

[00:24:56]There was a breakthrough in negotiations. As a gesture of good faith, as the deal came together, Trump added Huang to the plane. That is how business negotiations work. You hold something back until the moment is right. Then you use it as a signal. But why would America give China access to its most advanced chips?

[00:25:16]The answer is that semiconductors are not a closed system. The supply chain for high-end chips runs through California for design, Taiwan for fabrication, the Philippines for advanced packaging, and China for component integration. Not to mention raw materials sourced from Africa, South America, and Australia.

[00:25:37]No single country can control the entire pipeline. As long as America dominates the design layer and the trade networks through which the components flow, America retains structural advantage regardless of where the chips end up.

[00:25:52]Giving China access to chips is not giving China the keys to the kingdom. It is giving China entry to a system that America still controls. And beyond the competitive dimension, AI is not just a consumer technology. It is a surveillance technology.

[00:26:09]America has the algorithms. China has the population.

[00:26:14]And the absence of privacy protections.

[00:26:17]The ability to test AI surveillance tools on a billion-plus people in conditions that would be constitutionally impermissible in America is worth something. The two countries are not simply competitors in AI. They are, at some level, partners.

[00:26:33]Let me close with perhaps the most important point of all.

[00:26:37]Because understanding this changes how you interpret every piece of news you read about US-China relations going forward. Both countries are deeply, existentially invested in maintaining the global economic system. Not because they are friends, not because they share values, but because both are primary beneficiaries of a system that depends on continued collective belief to function. Think about what happened to the UAE. It was a gleaming hallucination. Universities from Georgetown and Cornell, the wealthiest people in the world flocking to Dubai, a skyline that seemed to announce the future.

[00:27:18]Then Iran launched missiles at it, and the illusion shattered.

[00:27:22]Once it shatters, it does not come back.

[00:27:26]The confidence that made Dubai Dubai was not a physical thing. It was a perception. Destroy the perception and you cannot reconstruct it. China is more fragile than the UAE in this sense, not less, because China is in the framework I've described a hallucination of a hallucination. It is more leveraged to the underlying belief. If the global financial system comes under severe stress, if the US Treasury market seizes, if the dollar loses reserve status, if the trade networks fragment, China does not just suffer. China collapses first. The Chinese Communist Party understands this. The lesson of the trade war years was not that China could decouple from America and build its own independent sphere. It was the opposite. The trade war showed that every time the two economies pulled apart, money fled China and moved toward the source. Consumer confidence never recovered. The best young people left.

[00:28:28]The hollowing out accelerated. So, what China learned, and what is driving this summit, is that the only path to stability is deeper integration. Not independence, integration. Recoupling more tightly to the system that created it. At terms that give China better access to energy, technology, and markets. And America's lesson from the same period is different, but complementary.

[00:28:54]The trade war and the tariff battles were costly, disruptive, and ultimately self-defeating as a strategy for reshoring manufacturing.

[00:29:04]You cannot undo 50 years of supply chain architecture with executive orders.

[00:29:10]What you can do is extract more value from the existing system. Open the Chinese financial sector, sell digital dollar instruments to Chinese savers, use China's household savings to finance American debt at suppressed interest rates. Both sides walked away from a decade of conflict with a clearer understanding of what they each need.

[00:29:32]And what they each need is each other.

[00:29:35]So, let me be concrete about what I expect to emerge from the summit and what I expect to take shape over the coming months. China gets three things.

[00:29:45]First, access to stable, affordable energy from the Western Hemisphere.

[00:29:49]Essentially, American assurance that its energy supply chains through the Americas will not be disrupted.

[00:29:57]Second, access to Nvidia chips and high-end semiconductors, which is the fuel China needs for its AI and technology development.

[00:30:07]Third, continued access to American consumer markets. The export machine that drives Chinese manufacturing keeps running, perhaps under new terms, but it keeps running. America gets three things. First, access to China's financial sector, the ability to sell financial products, stable coins, wealth management instruments, and investment vehicles to Chinese consumers and institutions.

[00:30:33]This is the mechanism through which America refinances its debt burden by tapping the world's largest pool of forced savings. Second, a degree of influence and partnership in China's AI development, gaining access to the data and population scale that China offers as a testing ground.

[00:30:53]Third, Chinese manufacturing investment in America and in American controlled territories like Venezuela, China's industrial capacity directed at projects and places that benefit the American economic sphere. The Taiwan question gets quietly managed.

[00:31:10]America shifts its public posture from strategic ambiguity towards something that gives China more political cover domestically, while transferring the strategic burden of managing that issue to Japan and South Korea. And across all of this, the trade war formally de-escalates.

[00:31:30]Not because the underlying tensions have disappeared, but because both sides have concluded that continued conflict is more expensive than a negotiated There is a tendency to watch a moment like this one, Trump in Beijing, the handshakes and the banquets, the carefully staged photographs, and to dismiss it as ceremony. Politics as performance, leaders performing for their domestic audiences while the real world grinds on unchanged. I am arguing something different. I am arguing that the real world is in a deep sense made of exactly these performances.

[00:32:10]The agreements reached in rooms like the Great Hall of the People do not merely describe reality, they constitute it.

[00:32:19]They set the terms within which hundreds of millions of people live and work and save and borrow and build. Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972 was a performance, too, and it produced the world we have lived in for the last 50 years. What happens in Beijing in the next 48 hours may well produce the world we will live in for the next 50. The grand bargain, if it materializes, and I believe it will, will not resolve the fundamental tensions between the United States and China.

[00:32:52]Those tensions are structural, rooted in incompatible political systems, competing visions of world order, and a deep mutual suspicion built up over decades.

[00:33:04]What it will do is establish new rules for managing those tensions. Rules that allow both sides to extract what they need from each other without tipping the global system into the kind of catastrophic disruption that neither can afford.

[00:33:21]The hallucination must be maintained.

[00:33:24]Both sides know it. That knowledge, as much as anything else, is what brought $12 trillion of corporate America to Beijing this morning. We will see what comes next.