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...
Image Crdit: Phelps Twitter Account Michael Phelps is in Shanghai for the world 2011 swimming championships this weekend. He does not appear to be the best and that distinction goes to another free spirit who goes by the name of Ryan lochte. Phelps is on Twitter and Facebook where he keeps in touch with his fans, friends and followers. He is a frequent Twitter user as can be sen from his account. Since landing in China he was under the impression that he would not be able to use these social networking sites that have been banned in China. Apparently not so and since landing he has been tweeting constantly. Chinese fans have been using roundabout methods to be able to read his tweets. He connected to Facebook and Twitter and found that he had access and just kept on tweeting, in addition to that he also has a weibo account. We have already written about weibo which is a Chinese micro-blogging site much like Twitter. It has been built along the lines of Twitter and is huhgely popular...