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...
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin has sent letters to thirty tech companies including Amazon, Facebook and Twitter asking them to detail their human rights practices in China after Google threatened to pull out of China. The Democratic Senator of Illinois who is chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on Human Rights and Law also said there would be a hearing in February on Global Internet Freedom. He said the hearing would feature companies like Google and their business practices in internet restricted countries. Durbin's letter comes nearly three weeks after Google Inc. said it would stop censoring search results in China and threatened to pull out of the country altogether after uncovering a hacking attack that emanated from China and attempts to snoop on dissidents. Durbin said he is gathering information about the conduct of other big technology companies to prepare for a hearing on Google's actions in China. The hearing will also examine the Global Network Initiative, a ...