Last Sunday morning, the Treasury Secretary Bessent and the Vice Premier of China sat down to negotiate the commercial future of the two largest economies on earth. They did not meet at the Treasury or at a consulate, but rather at the Manhattan headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. This seems a little fishy to me.
The official explanation, given to Reuters by one unnamed person, is that UN security made the building convenient and that JPMorgan was not a party to the talks. But when two governments need a room and the room they choose belongs to the largest bank in America, you are looking at a picture of how the world actually works.
On Thursday, Xi Jinping arrives at the White House for a full state visit. In May, I wrote in The China Card that Trump’s trip to Beijing was not a trade summit but the merger of American and Chinese Technocracy into a single global order, with China coming to the table because it had run out of time. Xi’s visit closes that loop. Before he lands, here is what has held up since May, what is still hanging, and what to watch this week.
What I Told You in May
I wrote that three boards were being assembled to replace the post-UN, post-WTO order: a Board of Peace for conflict, a Board of Trade for commerce and a Board of Investment for capital. The two new boards had no charter and no members, and I said this is exactly how technocratic architecture gets built. The framework arrives first. The democratic debate never does.
I described five walls going up around Beijing, from Pax Silica to the energy squeeze. And I ended by saying that Xi Jinping, for all of China’s multipolar rhetoric, would decide for Technocracy.
The Boards Are Going Up
On June 5, the U.S. Trade Representative published a notice in the Federal Register asking for comments on the Board of Trade. The title of that notice describes it as a mechanism for “Reciprocal Managed Trade With China.” Managed trade is the phrase I used in May for what the Trilateral Commission built into the WTO. Now the government uses it about itself. The notice cites no legal authority for creating the board. It names no members, no chairman, and no role for Congress.
Yet when Scott Bessent and Jamieson Greer came out of that meeting on Sunday, Greer announced that the Board of Trade had been “operationalized.” A board with no charter, no members, and no vote of any legislature is now operating. He said its job is to find a “critical mass of goods” that can be set apart “when and if there are trade measures” down the road.
That is the Abraham Accords template I described in May, and now it comes from the Trade Representative’s own mouth. You lock in the commerce first. You wall it off from politics. Then the political questions, Taiwan above all, become too expensive to raise. The Chinese Embassy put it more bluntly, saying the boards move the relationship from “crisis response” to “mechanized management.” Technocrats on both sides of the Pacific speak the same language because they hold the same doctrine.
What Is Still Hanging
Jensen Huang was the last-minute addition to Air Force One in May. Trump personally called him over the objections of the China hawks in Congress, and I wrote that AI chips were on the table. They were. Washington had licensed about ten Chinese companies to buy Nvidia’s H200 chips. The terms were remarkable: a 25 percent cut of every sale paid to the U.S. Treasury, and every chip inspected on American soil before it shipped.
Beijing turned it down. Trump said so himself on the flight home, telling reporters that China “chose not to” buy because “they want to develop their own.” Chinese firms withdrew their orders and were pointed toward Huawei. Nvidia’s share of that market went from around 95 percent to essentially zero.
I said China was boxed in and would take the seat on American terms. On chips, it did not. In my judgment, Xi saw that the carrot had a leash attached. A chip that is taxed by Washington and inspected by Washington is a chip administered by Washington, and he chose to pay the price of building his own.
So why is Jensen Huang on the guest list for Thursday’s state dinner, alongside Jamie Dimon, Jane Fraser and Sam Altman? Because the offer is still on the table. What I want to know is whether the terms have changed.
Other threads are hanging as well. The Board of Investment stalled over the summer, yet Reuters reports new rules coming to let American drug companies invest in China, and Trump says he is open to Chinese automakers building plants here. The investment is moving even if the board is not.
He Lifeng is bringing a delegation of Chinese companies that Reuters says mirrors the group Trump took to Beijing. No names have been released. In May I showed that six of Trump’s executives sat on the Tsinghua University advisory board. When Beijing’s list comes out, I will be looking for the mirror image.
And Taiwan has not appeared in any readout I have seen. That fits a political question being walled off. It also fits ordinary caution before a summit.
The Sentence Nobody Noticed
Before Sunday’s meeting, Bessent put out a statement saying the United States is open to discussions on “avoiding shared risks and avoiding bifurcation of our two systems.” Afterward, he announced a proposed “U.S.-China AI Dialogue,” with a notification mechanism for AI incidents that threaten national security. He talked about transparency between “the number one and the number two AI powers in the world.”
The press keeps telling you this is an AI race. People in a race do not set up notification channels with each other, and they do not describe splitting into two systems as a risk they share. Pax Silica was designed to do precisely that — divide the world into an American stack and everybody else. If the Treasury Secretary now calls that division a danger, then Pax Silica was never the goal. It was the leverage. I said as much in May. One sentence does not prove it, but Thursday might.
What to Watch For This Week
Watch the chips first. If Beijing approves the blocked purchases, or Washington drops the 25 percent fee or loosens its rules, the deal I described in May is done.
Watch whether the Board of Trade gets a charter, named members or any role for Congress, or simply keeps operating without them. Watch whether the AI Dialogue becomes a permanent body, and notice that it is the Treasury Secretary running it, not anyone from defense. Watch for what is not said about Taiwan.
And watch the dinner. The White House reportedly turned down a formal CEO roundtable, which means the executives of both nations will do their talking over dessert, off the record.
If China takes the chips, my May conclusion stands, four months late. If it refuses again, we are looking at something I did not anticipate: one doctrine running on two separate infrastructures, coordinated at the top by boards and dialogues. Whatever comes out of that room, I will report it to you next week.
What I can tell you today is that it has never mattered which flag flies outside the building. The men inside believe the same thing: that the world is an engineering problem, and that they are the engineers.
Nobody in either country has been asked to vote on any of it, and nobody will be.
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