Erin Ogunkeye is pleased to welcome Henrietta Levin, Senior Fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The US remains a powerful actor in its relationship with China. But power on paper is not the same thing as leverage at the negotiating table. Levin warns that President Trump’s highly personalized approach to Xi Jinping offers Beijing opportunities that China can easily exploit. Xi does not approach the relationship in the same way. Au contraire, he sees the United States as an adversary to be managed while China pursues its domestic priorities and strategic objectives in Asia, including on Taiwan. 

🇺🇸 🇨🇳 As Donald #Trump welcomed his Chinese counterpart Xi #Jinping for a state visit on the tarmac of an airport near #Washington, the sound of a fighter jet during the military ceremony caught the US president off guard, prompting a series of startled facial expressions.

Eve Irvine is pleased to welcome Dimitry Elias Léger, journalist and author of "Death of the Soccer God". He begins with an extraordinary but largely forgotten moment in sporting history: the Haitian-born Joe Gaetjens scoring the goal that gave the US its famous victory over England at the 1950 World Cup. But Léger is less interested in reconstructing Gaetjens’s biography than in using the football star's journey as a " jumping point" to examining diaspora, fame, mortality and moral responsibility. Success offers neither immunity from history nor escape from mortality: as he puts it, “You could be super famous and end up on death row” or die wealthy in your own bed: “Either way, you’re going to die.