On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Microsoft has launched a twitter-style service in China usings its MSN live service. The new service is called Juku Which is slang for "Cool" or "Gathering". This allows users to post messages within a stipulated 140 character limit. With old messages slowely scrolling along side Users can also see automatic updates of friends messages. "MSN China, the Microsoft joint venture that developed the new product, insisted it is not a micro-blog service. "Juku is a local innovation developed by MSN China ... based on Windows Live Messenger networks," a company representative said in an e-mail." It is reported that the service also allows users to play games and win prizes such as new face icons to post in messages. Users can also upload their profile picture and browse for people they know to add as friends. Windows live messenger is popular in China and this could be a huge effort to win more people to use their instant messanger service. Micro bloggi...