President Trump arrived in Beijing with what may be the most impressive delegation of American business power ever assembled for a foreign summit, including Elon Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and BlackRock’s Larry Fink, opening the meetings with effusive praise for Xi Jinping that he acknowledged even some of his own supporters find uncomfortable.
Ian Williams, former foreign correspondent for BBC, Channel 4 News, and NBC, and author of Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess what is actually happening beneath the ceremonial surface of the Beijing summit.
Williams said the contrast between Trump’s public flattery and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s remarks on Air Force One en route to Beijing captures the real dynamic well. Rubio laid out three concrete reasons why resolving the Strait of Hormuz crisis is directly in China’s interest: Chinese cargo ships are stuck in the Persian Gulf after one was struck over the weekend despite not flying a Chinese flag, the strait closure is destabilizing Asia more than any other region because Asian economies are the most heavily dependent on Gulf energy, and China’s export-driven economy requires customers whose own economies are functioning, and the strait crisis is melting down economies around the world that would otherwise be buying Chinese products. Williams said Rubio’s framing was necessary and far more realistic about the actual state of the relationship than the ceremonial flattery suggested.
On the question of relative bargaining strength, Williams said the hype around Chinese technological advancement, while not entirely without basis, obscures the degree to which that advancement has been built on theft and smuggling rather than organic innovation. On the eve of the summit, the White House accused Chinese AI laboratories of industrial-scale theft through a process called distillation, in which Chinese companies train their smaller AI models using outputs from large American models, effectively acquiring at no cost the knowledge that American companies spent billions to develop. The Justice Department has produced indictments documenting industrial-scale smuggling of top-end semiconductor chips through Southeast Asian intermediaries into China. Williams said AI is the defining technology of global power competition and that China’s position in the race still depends substantially on these practices, a point the American side will press in private conversations regardless of the warmth of the public ceremonial.
He said China retains real leverage of its own, demonstrated most clearly last year when it weaponized rare earth and critical mineral exports, disrupting high-technology supply chains across the developed world. The summit’s outcome, he predicted, is likely to be an extension of an awkward truce rather than any fundamental resolution, with difficult discussions happening behind closed doors that the public pageantry is designed to obscure.
On the delegation of business leaders Trump brought to Beijing, Williams said the signal was deliberate and important. Musk, Cook, Huang, and their peers do enormous business in China, depend on it both as a market and as a manufacturing base, and have all experienced Chinese coercion firsthand. Apple has been trying to diversify its supply chains into India and Vietnam while China has been actively obstructing that process, making it illegal to shift supply chains and blocking the export of relevant equipment and personnel. Musk brought electric vehicle expertise into China openly, which China has now leveraged to build a domestic EV industry that competes with Tesla globally. Williams said these are people who understand the bruising reality of doing business in China and cannot easily be deceived about what they are dealing with, and their presence at Trump’s side sent that message clearly.
On the leaked intelligence assessment suggesting China may be supplying defensive weapons to American Gulf State allies to extend its influence in the region, Williams said it would be entirely in character. He pointed to China’s role in sustaining Russia’s war in Ukraine through economic underwriting and dual-use technology transfers, reports of Chinese satellite data being provided to Iran, and Beijing’s pattern of using every major geopolitical disruption to find ways of expanding its commercial and political footprint. He said China does not form alliances in the conventional sense but describes its relationships as partnerships, a framing that allows it to play multiple sides simultaneously while maintaining plausible distance from any single party’s actions.
He assessed the diminishment of Iran as a genuine strategic loss for China. Beijing had been purchasing approximately eighty percent of Iran’s oil exports, had committed half a trillion dollars in its twenty-five-year strategic plan to further investments in Iranian infrastructure, and had installed its surveillance technology throughout the Iranian state apparatus. China has notably not intervened diplomatically or militarily to assist Iran during the campaign, despite the Iranian foreign minister traveling to Beijing last week and expressing trust in China. Williams said Beijing is now positioning itself to benefit from the post-war reconstruction phase, including by exporting its heavily subsidized renewable energy technology to a region seeking to reduce oil dependence, and to leverage Putin’s forthcoming Beijing visit as another opportunity to project the image of a power that both sides of the conflict need to engage.