Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing this May marked the first time a sitting US president traveled to China since 2017.
To understand this trip, it is important to emphasize that it was the United States that requested the meeting. Beijing did not initiate it.
This begs the question: Why was Trump so desperate to sit down with China’s President Xi Jinping?
The short answer is the US economy is in dire straits.
The aggressive trade war that the US launched against China during Trump’s first term, which he then heavily escalated in 2025, has backfired spectacularly.
Inflation is rising fast in the US, and Trump’s tariffs have only poured fuel on the inflationary fire, while also accelerating deindustrialization and supply-chain dysfunction.
Washington is operating from a position of distinct vulnerability. Even major US think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations now openly acknowledge that Beijing has “the upper hand”, and Washington “has lost its leverage over China”.
Trump invited the CEOs of a dozen US corporations to travel to China with him
Trump has never been one for subtlety. He constantly “says the quiet part loud”.
On his website Truth Social, Trump boasted about the corporate entourage accompanying him to China. The US delegation consisted of many of the most powerful billionaire oligarchs in the country:
- Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, the world’s richest billionaire oligarch, who spent $288 million to get Trump and his Republican allies elected;
- Jensen Huang of Nvidia, which is now the world’s most valuable corporation, with a $5.5 trillion market capitalization, driven by the AI bubble;
- Tim Cook of Apple, whom Trump calls “Tim Apple”;
- Larry Fink of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager;
- Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, the biggest alternative asset manager, and Schwarzman was a major funder of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign;
- Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg;
- Cargill CEO Brian Sikes;
- Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser;
- GE Aerospace CEO Larry Culp;
- Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon;
- Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra; and
- Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon.
In fact, when Trump flew to China, he was physically joined on Air Force One by the billionaires Musk and Huang.
When the US president met with the Chinese leadership, he was flanked by these corporate oligarchs.
The symbolism was unmistakable: these CEOs were effectively being treated as shadow government officials.
It was the clearest demonstration that US government policy is made by and for large corporations, and the rich elites who run and invest in them.
Only further confirming this is the fact that the US ambassador in China, David Perdue, was previously the president of Reebok and CEO of Dollar General.
US trade war backfired: Nvidia’s market share in China went from 95% to 0%
Why were these US corporate executives so eager to travel to China with Trump? The answer is simple: They are desperate to secure access to the world’s largest market.
China has a population of 1.4 billion people, including the largest middle class on Earth. Brookings Institution researchers estimated that there will be 1.2 billion Chinese in the middle class in 2027, which is a quarter of the entire world’s middle class.
“China already makes up the largest middle-class consumption market segment in the world and is a priority market for major multinational firms”, the researchers wrote.
US corporations have always been desperate to penetrate China’s enormous market. After Deng Xiaoping initiated the Reform and Opening Up in 1978, he allowed some to do so under the condition that they share their technology and establish joint ventures with Chinese firms. The slogan was “market (access) for technology” (transfer): 市场换技术 (shìchǎng huàn jìshù).
When Trump launched the US trade war against China in 2018, he put the two countries on the gradual path toward economic “decoupling”. This is a slow process, but trade and investment between the US and China have fallen significantly in the past decade.
Some major US corporations have been very negatively impacted by this trade war.
In particular, the prominent presence of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Trump’s trip to China highlighted the stark failure of Washington’s tech containment strategy.
In an effort to sabotage China’s AI development, both the Biden and Trump administrations restricted the export of advanced chips.
This campaign of tech warfare — known as the “chip war” — blew back hard on Nvidia. Huang lamented that the US corporation previously controlled 95% of the Chinese market for advanced AI chips, but its market share has fallen to zero.
Instead of allowing the US to monopolize AI and other advanced technologies, Beijing responded by pouring billions of dollars into industrial policy measures, to develop its own domestic semiconductor industry.
China has made rapid progress. It is now dominating the global market for legacy chips, and will likely catch up to US Big Tech companies very soon.
Some US corporate executives have clearly asked Trump to reconsider his strategy. The scorched-earth campaign of economic war and tech war against China has backfired, and they hoped for some kind of grand bargain.
Trump’s trip was a failure: China wasn’t interested
However, Beijing was apparently not nearly as interested as Washington was.
Many Western media outlets acknowledged that very little came out of the trip. Some even called it a failure. Trump returned home mostly empty-handed.
Trump boasted that China will order 200 planes from Boeing, but the US corporation’s stock price actually fell 4% in response to this news, because analysts had expected that it would purchase 500.
The US government did give Nvidia the green light to sell its second-most advanced AI chip, the H200, to 10 Chinese tech companies, but Reuters pointed out that “not a single delivery has been made so far”.
Reuters concluded, “U.S. President Donald Trump left China on [15 May] with no major breakthroughs on trade or tangible help from Beijing to end the Iran war”.
It was easy to predict this outcome. The US government has spent nearly a decade now waging a trade and tech war, aiming to prevent China from developing, seeking to isolate the country.
Why Trump thought he could suddenly play nice, and get China to make concessions to benefit the US at its expense, is a mystery.
Moreover, the US started a war of aggression against Iran, which has disrupted the global economy and caused the largest oil crisis in history, but Trump now expects China to bail him out. It is clearly absurd.
In other words, after years of punching China in the face, Trump hopes Beijing will help to save the US economy. It is obvious why China was not interested.
China holds the cards, not the US
When Trump unilaterally escalated the trade war against China in April 2025, threatening tariffs as high as 145%, Beijing surprised Washington by hitting back, putting proportional levies on US exports.
Trump fumed, “We have much bigger and better cards than they do”. The US president claimed that he could “destroy China” with his “incredible cards”.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was enraged. He went on CNBC and declared, “I think it was a big mistake, this Chinese escalation, because they’re playing with a pair of twos”.
“What do we lose by the Chinese raising tariffs on us?” asked Bessent, a former hedge-fund manager from Wall Street. “We export one-fifth to them of what they export to us, so that is a losing hand for them”.
In reality, the opposite was true: China holds significantly more valuable cards.
The clearest example of this was how Beijing responded to Washington’s unilateral tariffs and tech export restrictions by cutting off US access to rare-earth elements.
This caused a political earthquake in Washington, because US corporations cannot manufacture their products without Chinese rare earths. The US military-industrial complex cannot make its weapons systems without them either.
China dominates the global supply chain for many critical minerals.
Recognizing this vulnerability, the US government has sought to develop a new supply chain. Under Marco Rubio, the State Department launched a “Pax Silica” initiative, and invited dozens of countries this February to participate in its Critical Minerals Ministerial in Washington.
However, building these parallel networks will take years, meaning the US has no option but to play nice with China if it wants critical minerals.
In terms of Chinese leverage, the presence of Elon Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook on Trump’s trip was especially telling.
For nearly a decade, Washington has pressured US companies to “de-risk” by moving production lines out of China, “friendshoring” factories to countries like India.
However, shifting these supply chains has proven to be nearly impossible, given the complexity of China’s domestic manufacturing ecosystem.
Apple has tried to make its iPhones in India, but has faced many problems.
Tesla serves as the ultimate case study. More than half of the company’s electric vehicles (EVs) are manufactured at its “gigafactory” in Shanghai.
This is despite the fact that, in 2024, Tesla CEO Elon Musk asked for domestic trade barriers, warning that his Chinese competitors would “demolish” US EV manufacturers. Soon after, the US government (then under Joe Biden) put 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs.
All of this demonstrates the extreme hypocrisy of US policy toward China. Washington wants Beijing to sacrifice its own interests to serve those of US corporations. Some comprador elites in other countries may be willing to do so, to enrich themselves at their nation’s expense; but not China’s leadership, which is dedicated to developing its country.
The United States is learning the hard way that it can no longer push around China.
Eric Arthur Blair
2026-05-17 at 16:43
Trumpty Dumpty: Do you agree that shipping through Hormuz should not be blockaded?
Xi Jin Ping: Iran is not blocking any Chinese ships through Hormuz. I agree the USA must stop blocking shipping in and out of Hormuz.
Trumpty Dumpty: Do you agree Iran should not charge any toll on shipping through Hormuz?
Xi Jin Ping: Iran is not charging any toll on any Chinese ships.
Trumpty Dumpty: Do you agree Iran should not decelop nuclear weapons?
Xi Jin Ping: Iran declared long ago they had no interest in developing nuclear weapons, which was robustly enforced by the JCPOA which you then reneged on.
Trumpty Dumpty: Will you buy heaps of Boeing jets and soybeans from the USA?
Xi Jin Ping: If you cancel your import tariffs, we can consider it depending on details worked out by our trade departments.
(translation from Mandarin: we can throw you a few meaningless crumbs, but no Rare Earths for you)
Trumpty Dumpty announces to the world unilaterally:
My buddy Xi agrees 100% with me that Iran must lift any blockade on Hormuz, that Iran must not charge any toll for passage, that Iran must never be allowed to have a nuclear bomb and that China will buy heaps of Boeings and soybeans from the USA. I just cut the greatest, most beautifulest deal that anybody has ever seen in the history of the Universe.
Eric Arthur Blair
2026-05-17 at 19:48
Please recall that China cancelled ALL soybean imports from the USA and Chinese deliveries/orders of at least 200 Boeing jets from the USA after Trump imposed 145% import tariffs on Chinese goods in 2025
https://www.tbsnews.net/explainer/here-timeline-trumps-trade-war-china-2025-1278651
This means that the purported but not confirmed “new” jet and soybean orders from China represent a return to square one.
Perfect example of how Trump creates a problem then “solves” it then declares himself a deal-making stable genius.
Narco Rubio’s recent wet dream aspiration that the USA could somehow open Hormuz and return things back to before 28 February this year however will NOT occur, there is no returning back to square one on that, Trump has cooked his own goose.
Eric Arthur Blair
2026-05-17 at 20:13
Note to Ben:
US trucks do NOT run on gasoline. US trucks, along with long distance US buses and locomotives and all agricultural and mining machinery, all run on DIESEL, which the USA is fast running out of, together with jet fuel. Ships run on heavy diesel (bunker fuel).
GASOLINE Is NOT NOT NOT INTERCHANGEABLE WITH DIESEL OR JET FUEL.
Diesel and jet fuel are the work horse fuels of the US economy, which will soon CRASH due to FATAL physical fuel constraints.
The “large” domestic US oil production is almost entirely shale LTO, around 12 million barrels per day, with bugger all conventional crude production.
The diesel needed to produce US shale oil comes from imported crude oil, whether conventional crude from, say, Mexico or Brazil, or unconventional tar sands from Canada, blended with LTO to alow flow through pipes.
Shale oil production REQUIRES VEHICLES AND MACHINERY THAT RUN ON DIESEL. No diesel, no shale LTO production. Shale LTO cannot be made into diesel or jet fuel.
I repeat.
Shale oil production REQUIRES VEHICLES AND MACHINERY THAT RUN ON DIESEL. No diesel, no shale LTO production. Shale LTO cannot be made into diesel or jet fuel.
Shale LTO can be made into gasoline to run private cars and jetskis and weedwhackers, but CANNOT be made into diesel or jet fuel.
THE USA IS NOT NOT NOT OIL INDEPENDENT AND SHALE OIL LTO IS THE SCAMMIEST SCAM IN THE HISTORY OF SCAMMERY.
Eric Arthur Blair
2026-05-17 at 20:24
Since peaking in 1970, the output of US conventional oil has diminished to a trickle.
Yes, the USA now produces about 12 million barrels of shale LTO per day, but whereas in the past, high EROEI conventional oil could be returned upstream to produce more high EROEI conventional oil (while also producing big surplus for industrial/agricultural uses), this is UNTRUE for low EROEI shale UNconventional OIL.
Honest whole life cycle analyses of oil fracking (which MUST INCLUDE essential wildcatting of hundreds to thousands of dry holes before any sweet spots can be found, which MUST INCLUDE energy for transportation of all rig equipment, demountable dwellings etc to and from drill sites) suggest an EROEI of shale LTO around 4:1 *.
It is reasonable to believe thermodynamic losses in fracking shale LTO are at least 66%
WHY? Because diesel engines have around 66% heat losses and almost all equipment to extract LTO eg the mining and trucking in of special sand, trucking in of solvents, drilling of inflow and outflow wells, drilling for water aquifers and the pumping of water, solvent and sand at super high pressures to fracture superdeep rocks, pumping waste water away, drilling of wells to inject waste water into, pumping waste water into those wells at high pressure, are all run with diesel engines.
An EROEI of 4:1 suggests the USA is using ~3 million barrels per day of imported oil to produce ~12 million barrels per day of shale LTO (note that shale LTO is less energy dense than diesel and cannot itself be turned into diesel).
I cannot repeat this often enough – the USA shale LTO industry is a SCAM which could only be pursued by IGNORING the costly energy inputs (of imported diesel) which the USA could historically do because it obtained imported energy for FREE by virtue of the US petrodollar.
Even if the Permian basin could continue production at current rates indefinitely (it cannot, rig counts are falling and effluent is becoming ever more gassy), the death of the petrodollar means the death of the shale LTO scam.
Eric Arthur Blair
2026-05-31 at 16:00
ESSENTIAL,UNMISSABLE INTERVIEW
Art Berman, oil expert:
https://www.youtube.com/live/IyVUgJ_5H5k?si=S3wXybg25TboWpMb
JonnyJames
2026-05-21 at 11:54
Great comments EAB!
Reading knowledgeable, honest reporting and analysis like Ben’s is refreshing when compared to so-called progressive or left media outlets like Thomm Hartmann and Democracy Now. (The Guardian has long since become a warmongering asset of MI6. For kicks, I turned on Hartmann’s show and was treated to an ignorance-filled, warmongering demonization of Russia. The evil Russians are indoctrinating the residents of Donetsk, Lugansk, into thinking they are Russian. No mention was made that the vast majority of those regions want to be part of Russia, their native language and culture is Russian, and that Ukrainian is not spoken there. etc.
As always, the underlying assumptions are that Russia just invaded for no reason, because Russians are inherently evil, they are the Other, not like the “democratic” governments of the west who fund and support genocide, murdering children etc.
Outright falsehoods were repeated that would make the folks in Langley proud. Is Hartmann an asset? He might as well be. Don’t his followers see the transparent hypocrisy and lies being pushed? With leftists and progressives like that, we don’t need no racist, right-wing authoritarians and warmongers.
Same with HypocrisyNow: they take every opportunity to legitimize the “Gulf states” who are just victims of Iran’s attacks. (they never call them regimes, or family dictatorships), they forgot about KSA executing hundreds of people by decapitation with a sword, and even CRUCIFIXION as a means of capital punishment. Yet most of the time on the show, Iran is a brutal “regime” that massacres innocent protesters blah blah blah. No mention of CIA/MI6/Mossad. They are apparently forbidden to mention the names of those agencies. The CIA bake cupcakes for charity eh, they are a philanthropic organization.
I can only speculate that the show is part of what the CIA calls “the compatible Left” and I would be willing to bet that shows like DNow and Hartmann are assets of US intelligence. They constantly shill for the divide-and-rule, D/R, red team, blue team false dichotomy. They don’t want people to realize there is no meaningful choice, no democracy, no rule of law. Simply voting for a corrupt, amoral, pro-genocide, “lesser evil” only perpetuates the status-quo. That is their intention, but few can see it.
Eric Arthur Blair
2026-05-22 at 06:12
“HypocrisyNow”
I love it!
The talking head being Amy Badman?
Eric Arthur Blair
2026-05-22 at 06:13
HOLY CRAP!!!!
Gobsmacking jaw dropping revelations from Chris Martinsen’s research
https://www.youtube.com/live/9p3nIgHa6Wc?si=gdlpu6gAleFKR3jU
from 13 minutes…
We already know the USA has been selling off its SPR overseas in an insanely shortsighted attempt to keep global oil prices down. This will lead to industrial/agricultural/transport colapse in the USA in around 50+ days.
EVEN MORE ASTOUNDING…
From 36 minutes…
The Cayman Islands dodgy banking system was discovered earlier this year to harbour opaque accounts containing ~ $1.38 TRILLION worth of US treasury bonds belonging to undisclosed entities (all along they only admitted to holding $340 billion, ie >$1 TRILLION was HIDDEN). Who bought those >$1trillion US treasuries?
A year before that, Elon Musk, when working for DOGE, discovered multiple magic money computer facilities in the US government (especially the Treasury).
Could it be that the US Treasury has been conjuring trillions of USD out of nothing to buy it’s own bonds, then hiding them from scrutiny, to counteract the dumping of bonds by China and Japan?? To keep US bond demand and hence values up, to keep US bond yields low and hence US debt repayments low?
A desperate attempt to prevent a US bond crash using financial hocus pocus AKA sleight of hand AKA FRAUD ???
If you or I were caught printing US funny money, we would be sent to jail.
Talk about artificially rigging oil prices and US bond prices. This will blow up in their own faces when mark to market reality prevails.
Eric Arthur Blair
2026-05-22 at 15:32
“Diplomacy is the art of telling your foe to go to hell while convincing them they will enjoy the trip” .
– Mr K Mahbubhani, worldwide respected senior diplomat.
In the podcast, Alexander M and Danny H explain how Xi Jinping employed diplomacy in dealing with Trump.
https://www.youtube.com/live/5P248cjOp9U?si=y0wRtwJzROoZnC9r
Xi: If you try to Ukrainise Taiwan against China, we will f*ck the USA in the arse.
Trump: I am being sufficiently arse f*cked by Iran at the moment. I would enjoy some relief from being arse f*cked, thank you. And thank you for the beans.
In other news, Tulsi Gabbard just quit. This is not about integrity or compassionate reasons, it is all about a rodent fleeing a sinking ship.
If Gabbard had any integrity, she would have quit on 28 February and forcefully condemned Trump’s attack on Iran.
Instead she said nothing and waited to see how things panned out. If Iran had crumbled, she would have held on to her position as director of National Stupidity and pursued further ambitions up the MAGA greasy pole.
Now that Iran is clearly winning, she uses some excuse about her husband’s cancer (nobody gives a shit you biatch, millions have died and are dying from unprovoked US wars, the latest which you supported) and she now hurls her plague ridden carcass off the sinking USS Trumpty Dumpty.
We ain’t buying it Tulsi, you are a filthy rodent beyond redemption.
Joseph
2026-05-22 at 21:07
You say “Apple has tried to make its iPhones in India, but has faced many problems.”
But cnet says : https://www.cnet.com/tech/apple-is-making-all-four-iphone-17-models-in-india-in-a-watershed-pivot-from-china-report-says/
It’s confusing!
Eric Arthur Blair
2026-05-26 at 15:11
The purpose of the LEMSO (Lying Establishment Media Sewer Outlets) is to confuse you.