The Banquet Where America Was Served If you are not at the table, you are on the menu. At the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing, ordinary Americans were nowhere near the table. The working family, the small business owner, the retiree, the consumer buying groceries with one eye on the receipt, and the taxpayer funding this imperial roadshow were all absent. But the corporate hunters were present, or close enough to smell the roast. Reuters reported a heavyweight business delegation tied to the China trip, including executives from Apple, BlackRock, Blackstone, Boeing, Cargill, Citi, Cisco, Goldman Sachs, Mastercard, Meta, Micron, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Tesla, Visa, and others. In plain English, the room was packed with financial power, tech power, manufacturing power, credit power, and global supply-chain power. These are not neutral spectators. These are institutions built to extract advantage, protect margins, shape policy, influence regulation, and turn public decisions into private gai...
Posts
Where's Marco?
The Beijing Pool Game and the Art of Being Ranked The first message from Beijing did not come in a communiqué, a press statement, or some bland diplomatic paragraph written by a committee of people allergic to verbs. It stood on the tarmac in the shape of one missing man. President Trump landed in China for a high-stakes summit with Xi Jinping, and Xi did not personally greet him. Trump received the red carpet, the honor guard, the military band, the flag-waving youths, and the choreographed warmth of a great power performing hospitality. What he did not receive was Xi. He was greeted by Chinese Vice President Han Zheng, along with other officials, which sounds respectable only to people who think diplomacy is mostly upholstery and handshakes. In Beijing, protocol is language. Rank is language. Absence is language. Xi’s absence said what no official statement would dare say aloud: we will receive you, Donald, but we do not receive you as Xi’s equal. Chinese statecraft is not a ca...