U.S.–China & China's Diplomacy

Direct U.S.–China contact produced nothing new in this batch, and that absence is itself the read: the leader-level scheduling channel sits exactly where the prior brief left it. What is new is not diplomacy at all — it is provincial investment- and industry-promotion activity inside China. That matters because with no announced Xi–Trump meeting, Beijing's operative posture toward Washington remains a live scheduling channel plus an open commercial door, not a breakthrough and not a rupture.

On the U.S. file, MFA spokesman Guo Jiakun 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. There is still no date and no venue. Guo also answered the question about the U.S. embassy's pilot in Panama for the world's first AI supply-chain certification and traceability platform — a project media describe as serving U.S. control of tech supply chains — by framing it as an exclusionary "small circle" (小圈子) that hurts the Global South's technological development, and offering instead a "just and reasonable" AI global-governance system ¹. That is the mechanism Beijing uses to convert U.S. tech containment into a Global South grievance.

The BRICS staging announced last cycle holds unchanged. Mao Ning called BRICS the most important platform for emerging-market and developing-country unity and the genuine "第一方阵" (first echelon) of the Global South, with Xi Jinping to attend the 18th leaders' meeting, deliver an important speech, and set direction for "大金砖合作" (Greater BRICS cooperation) ². The Global South leadership Beijing declined to confirm a day earlier is now being staged openly, pointedly aimed at partners rather than at Washington.

Friction on tech and trade is likewise unchanged. Anthropic said it banned accounts allegedly tied to Beijing using Claude to gather on overseas religious groups and Uyghurs in Syria ²; the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency accused DeepSeek and Moonshot of treating frontier-model theft as a "core" strategy, and Mao called that an unfounded smear ³; a U.S. firm said an AI hacking tool could seize WeChat accounts ³. Beijing's counter-framing remains the "pulling away the ladder" (抽梯子) rebuttal — China "never pulls away any country's ladder but builds ladders," citing Belt and Road, zero-tariff and "export to China" policies ³ — reinforced by the WIPO Global Innovation Index, where China's 25 top clusters ranked first for a fourth year ². On trade remedies, MOFCOM Announcement No. 38 extended the anti-dumping probe into pecans from Mexico and the United States to March 25, 2027 ⁴.

What is genuinely fresh is domestic and inbound-facing. Guangdong Governor Meng Fanli attended the opening of the 26th China International Investment and Trade Fair (CIFIT) in Xiamen, where Guangdong was guest province of honor, and met Brookfield chairman Bruce Flatt, COSCO's Lin Ji and Luckin's Guo Jinyi, pitching Guangdong as an investment destination under the 15th Five-Year Plan ⁵. Liaoning hosted the 2026 Global Industrial Internet Conference in Shenyang, themed around the national "AI+" action and industrial large models ⁶, and marked the 30th anniversary of the China Super Rice breeding program with a seed-industry conference ⁷. These are investment-promotion and agricultural-tech events, not diplomatic signals — but they are the visible face of the "open for business" default that runs beneath the unresolved U.S. track.

Implications: the dual track holds — a live leader-level scheduling channel plus a 15th Five-Year-Plan-anchored pitch to foreign and U.S. business, set against an expanding AI-containment fight and trade remedies on U.S. agriculture, answered by an openly scheduled BRICS leadership turn aimed at the Global South. 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.