China’s Vice Premier Liu He and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen talked via video call and discussed the economic situation and US-China relations. According to readouts from China’s commerce ministry and the US treasury department, the two sides agreed that developments in China and the US have important implications for the global economy and it’s crucial for both countries to strengthen communication and coordination of macroeconomic policies. Chinese Vice Premier Liu He expressed China’s views on US tariffs and sanctions and the treatment of Chinese companies in the meeting.
Xi-Biden Summit Produces Few Breakthroughs
Trump’s comments came after Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Fox News on Sunday that he had encouraged China to advise Iran not to close the Strait of Hormuz—the narrow waterway through which much of the world’s oil trade flows through and which Iran had threatened to close in response to U.S. intervention. China relies on crude oil imports from the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia, which pass through the strait, but is also the largest importer of Iranian oil, which is under economic sanctions by the U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter calls on China to halt its controversial land reclamation efforts in the South China Sea, saying that the United States opposes “any further militarization” of the disputed territory.
Biden’s China Strategy a Call to Revive U.S. Competitiveness
The Joe Biden administration affirms Pompeo’s declaration; by the end of the year, it bans all imports from Xinjiang. The Chinese government expels at least thirteen journalists from three U.S. newspapers—the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post—whose press credentials are set to expire in 2020. Beijing also demands that those outlets, as well as TIME and Voice of America, share information with the government about their operations in China. The Chinese Foreign Ministry says the moves are in response to the U.S. government’s decision earlier in the year to limit the number of Chinese journalists from five state-run media outlets in the United States to 100, down from 160, and designate those outlets as foreign missions.
The speech comes a day after US and Canadian naval vessels traversed the Taiwan strait, which led to a near collision with a Chinese military vessel. The US stated this was a routine transit, but the Chinese military criticized it as a “provocation”. Blinken was supposed to visit China in February of this year, but the trip was canceled following the fallout of the so-called “balloon incident”. The US Department of State has confirmed that Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit Beijing between June 16 and 21, during which time he will also visit London.
- The act requires Washington to provide Taipei with defensive arms, but does not officially violate the United States’ One-China policy.
- China has been routinely making such extensions amid the prolonged US-China trade war, and this is the fifth time.
- It will not be easy or quick to mitigate these risks, but China’s possible willingness to begin serious talks in these areas as well as the rest of the Biden-Xi summit menu are the metrics to determine if a framework for managing a competitive coexistence is possible.
- Both the US and China announced extensions to tariff exemptions on certain goods in late 2022.
- Jan Hernik is a journalist and publicist who gained experience in Polish independent Internet media broadcasts.
These rules aim to prevent U.S. investments from advancing technologies that could pose national security threats. On December 3, 2024, China announced retaliatory export controls on gallium, germanium, and antimony to the US. Over the next five years, the U.S.-China AI relationship will be shaped by tensions between strategic competition and the potential for collaboration.
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The same day, Biden’s aides, including the nominee for Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and the nominee for Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, indicated that the president planned to take a multilateral approach by enlisting the support of Western allies to maximize Washington’s leverage on Beijing. Newly sworn in, US President Joe Biden delivered his inaugural address and signed a flurry of executive orders on his first day in office. Five Chinese companies – Huawei Technologies Co., ZTE Corp., Hytera Communications Corp., Hikvision Digital Technology Co., and Dahua Technology Co. – were named to a new blacklist published by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on national security grounds under a 2019 law. Yang Jiechi accused the US of being “condescending” in its tone and retorted that the US had been misusing its military and financial might and abusing the notion of national security to obstruct trade flows and incite anti-China sentiment.
- As part of BIS’s commitment to continually evaluating the effectiveness of export controls, it released updated rules in October 2023 and April 2024.
- Critics will counter that China always was bent on pursuing technological self-reliance and that China’s indigenous innovation push long predated America’s enhanced export control restrictions.
- Given the number of international students pursuing AI-related degrees, Trump’s sudden revocation and reinstalment of 1,800 student visas in April will likely impact those who may accelerate AI innovation.
- As China moves production to other parts of the world, the United States eventually purchases Chinese goods from other trade partners, such as Mexico and Vietnam.
What Regime Change Means in Iran
And yet one episode from the last five years might point to a rare hopeful sign for the next five, on the cheery topic of inadvertent AI-directed nuclear war. Rutte’s comments signal that the West still views China mainly as a geopolitical security threat, even as Beijing tries to warm ties with Europe. Qi Dongtao, a senior research fellow at the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore, tells TIME that Trump’s approach to China makes it difficult to know whether the U.S. would militarily intervene to defend the millionaire next door Taiwan. Former President Joe Biden moved the U.S. from “strategic ambiguity”—the policy of deliberately not clarifying whether the U.S. would militarily defend Taiwan—to “strategic clarity,” Qi says. On multiple occasions, including in an interview with TIME last year, Biden said he wouldn’t rule out “using military force” to defend Taiwan in the case of an invasion. Trump’s tariffs “were accelerating a trend of Chinese businesses looking more and more overseas,” Figueroa says.
On November 15, 2023, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden held their first face-to-face meeting in a year at the Filoli Estate in San Francisco. This is only the second time the two leaders have met during Biden’s term as president, although the two have previously met several times in other official capacities. Senior US and Chinese officials met in Beijing for the third Financial Working Group (FWG) meeting from January 18 to 19, the first of these meetings to be held in China.
The two leaders addressed an array of geopolitical issues in a joint announcement, including “the importance of peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait”. In another swipe at China, the US and Japan announced to invest together in areas such as 5G, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, genomics, and semiconductor supply chains. The new rule advances a process that could lead more than 200 companies to be kicked off US exchanges and could make some Chinese firms less attractive to investors. It also requires enhanced disclosure from Chinese firms listing in the US via a variable interest entity (VIE). Chinese and other foreign firms are required to declare whether they’re owned or controlled by any foreign government.
The White House readout states that the meeting “was part of the effort to maintain open lines of communication and responsibly manage competition in the relationship” following the Xi-Biden talks in San Francisco in November. Meanwhile, the readout from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the talks “candid, substantive and productive”. The US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met with the Chinese Minister of National Defense Admiral Dong Jun at the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue defense summit in Singapore to discuss US-China defense relations and global security issues. This is the first face-to-face meeting between the countries’ military commanders since 2022 and follows a video conference call between the Secretary and the Admiral on April 16. According to the readout from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), Xi Jinping highlighted the need for global cooperation amid a turbulent international landscape, urging unity over division. He called for the US to work with China and for the two countries to “regard each other’s development as an opportunity rather than a challenge”, “to coexist peacefully and … promote the stability of China-US relations”.
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On the other hand, if American and Chinese leaders view AI solely through the lens of a race, both countries would come to view every action as a challenge and a threat, and both sides would grow even more reactive to the other. To escape this descent into oversimplified zero-sum thinking, Washington and Beijing will need to move beyond thinking of AI developments as a race with a winner and loser and instead come to accept that both sides will be running side-by-side for the foreseeable future. Rather than obsessing over which country is in the lead and what more the United States can do to slow China’s progress, U.S. policymakers must quickly gain comfort with the fact that America and China are going to be navigating the frontiers of AI side-by-side over the coming years.
– US calls on China to halt South China Sea build-up
At the same time, some of China’s most productive sectors, such as technology, are seeing a concerted political assault due to fears of ideological corruption or of straying outside of party control. Some have argued that it reflects a China whose power is peaking—to be followed by a slope of decline. A property sector that accounts for some 29 percent (or perhaps slightly less) of China’s economy remains the foundation of a fragile financial system, with $300 billion in total private and government debt.
At about the same time, China released two imprisoned Canadians, Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor, who had been held in China for over 1000 days. The prospect of meeting and bilateral talks offers some assurance that both sides are willing to step up diplomatic coordination despite the tensions rising between the global powers. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) terminated China Telecom America’s authority to provide telecom services in America.
Critics will counter that China always was bent on pursuing technological self-reliance and that China’s indigenous innovation push long predated America’s enhanced export control restrictions. I agree with this counterargument; however, the scale and velocity of China’s technological self-reliance campaign have increased from the trajectory China was on before America’s October 2022 export control regime was enacted. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman often relies on this rhetorical device to advocate for whatever incentive or exemption from regulation he is pursuing at the moment. Former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan also bought into the concept of a race and used it to justify the sweeping export control regime the Biden administration launched on October 7, 2022.
The implications are profound, and the AI race between the two great powers rightly commands attention. The rapid development and wide-scale adoption of artificial intelligence often is described as a race between the United States and China, the world’s two leading AI superpowers. In this framing, the two sides are in a battle for AI dominance, with the winner gaining enduring economic and geopolitical advantages over the other. They should also consciously cultivate a civic culture of fact-checking by investing in disinformation watchdogs.