U.S.–China & China's Diplomacy

The clearest move this period is Beijing flipping its conspicuous silence into an announced Xi Jinping trip. After MFA spokesman Guo Jiakun said on September 10 he had "no information to provide" on whether China's leader would attend the BRICS summit in India ¹, Mao Ning said a day later that Xi will attend the 18th BRICS leaders' meeting and deliver an important speech ². The U.S.–China track itself produced no new direct contact: the leader-level scheduling channel sits exactly where the prior brief left it. So the read this period comes from Beijing's other diplomacy — and it says the Global South leadership Beijing declined to confirm on September 10 is now being staged openly.

BRICS is being positioned as the frame, not just a venue. Mao Ning called it the most important platform for unity among emerging markets and developing countries, the "第一方阵" (first echelon) of the Global South, with Xi to set direction for "大金砖合作" (Greater BRICS cooperation) ². That doctrinal wrapper lands precisely as Beijing argues the United States is splitting the world into exclusionary "small circles."

On the U.S. file, the temperature is unchanged and no direct U.S.–China meeting appears in this batch. Guo restated the standing readout from Wang Yi's meeting with Ambassador David Perdue: head-of-state diplomacy has "irreplaceable strategic guidance" and "the two sides maintain communication on arrangements for head-of-state interaction within the year" ¹ — a live channel, still no date or venue. The commercial half also held: NDRC Vice Chairman Zhou Haibing and Beijing Vice Mayor Xia Linmao's "Embracing the 15th Five-Year Plan" roundtable with AmCham China, the USCBC and 60-plus U.S. firms called trade "mutually beneficial by nature" ³.

Friction broadened on the same two fronts. MOFCOM Announcement No. 38 extended the anti-dumping probe into pecans from Mexico and the United States to March 25, 2027 ⁴. On tech, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency accused DeepSeek and Moonshot of treating frontier-model theft as a "core" strategy — Mao Ning called it an unfounded smear and told Washington to implement the leaders' consensus ⁵; a U.S. firm said an AI hacking tool could seize WeChat accounts ⁵; and Anthropic said it banned accounts allegedly tied to Beijing using Claude to gather on religious groups and Uyghurs abroad ². Beijing's counter-framing this cycle is the "pulling away the ladder" (抽梯子) rebuttal — China says it "never pulls away any country's ladder but builds ladders," citing Belt and Road, zero-tariff and "export to China" policies ⁵ — reinforced by the WIPO Global Innovation Index, where China's 25 top clusters ranked first for a fourth year ².

The non-U.S. partner lattice thickened on schedule. Below BRICS: Zhou Haibing met Peru's energy and mines minister on minerals and investment ⁶; Zhou met Finland's economic affairs minister Puisto on circular economy and investment ⁷; and the CSRC's Wu Qing continued the Gulf capital-markets channel on September 7 with Oman's Financial Services Authority and Saudi Arabia's investment ministry ^8,9. Nepal received a fourth batch of relief supplies, Li Qiang met Qatar's prime minister, and Assistant FM Liu Bin hosted Pakistani former diplomats around the 75th anniversary of ties ^10,11.

Limits stay mounted on Taiwan and the wider neighborhood. Mao Ning attacked Taiwan's "dollar diplomacy" with Palau — aid up from $18m to $25m plus roughly $281,000 in grants to Palauan figures ahead of the Pacific Islands Forum ¹². Beijing pressed Japan on WWII history and the destruction of abandoned chemical weapons after an OPCW delegation toured disposal sites ^12,10, and dismissed a Philippine defense minister's claim about China filling a U.S.-ROK exercise gap ¹².

Implications: the dual track holds — a live leader-level scheduling channel plus a 15th Five-Year-Plan-anchored pitch to U.S. business, set against an expanding AI and supply-chain containment fight and trade remedies on U.S. agriculture, now answered by an openly scheduled BRICS leadership turn aimed at the Global South rather than at Washington. The decisive missing piece is still an announced Xi–Trump meeting. Watch the actual BRICS outcomes and Xi's speech, whether the Panama AI-certification platform spreads hemisphere-wide, whether the pecan probe ends in duties by March 2027, and whether the CSRC–Gulf channel converts into market plumbing rather than communiqués.