U.S.–China & China's Diplomacy

The 18th BRICS leaders' meeting was staging, not speculation, last cycle; now it has been held. Xi Jinping travelled to New Delhi for the Sept 12–13 summit, delivered important speeches in both sessions, and attached concrete Chinese commitments — while the U.S. leader-level channel stayed exactly where it was, a scheduling conversation with no date or venue. That asymmetry is the read: Beijing is building out the Global South platform it uses to hedge Washington at the same time it keeps the door to a Xi–Trump meeting open.

The BRICS deliverables are the substance. Xi framed 20 years of BRICS cooperation with three keywords — self-reliance, sticking together, and fruitful results — and cast the grouping as the most influential emerging-market platform. He positioned member states as "pioneers" of innovation, of peace and stability, of civilizational exchange and of global-governance reform, then put specifics behind it: China will take the lead in building a BRICS AI open-source zone (金砖国家人工智能开源专区), establish a BRICS digital industry cloud platform, and run a BRICS youth sci-tech innovation exchange plan ¹. The stated aim is capacity-building so Global South countries "benefit equally" from emerging technology. China takes the chair next year and will host the 19th leaders' meeting, which it bills as opening BRICS' third "golden decade" ¹.

On the U.S. file nothing moved. MFA spokesman Guo Jiakun again said head-of-state diplomacy has "irreplaceable strategic guidance" and that "the two sides maintain communication on arrangements for head-of-state interaction within the year" — the standing readout from Wang Yi's meeting with Ambassador David Perdue, still without a date or venue ². Guo also repeated Beijing's answer to the reported U.S. pilot in Panama for an AI supply-chain certification and traceability platform, calling it a closed, exclusionary "small circle" that hurts Global South technology development and countering with a "just and reasonable" AI governance system ². That is the mechanism by which Beijing converts U.S. tech containment into a developing-world grievance — the same frame it now carries inside BRICS.

The counterweight is business-facing and concrete. On Sept 10 the NDRC held a high-level roundtable with U.S. multinational companies in China under the theme "embracing the 15th Five-Year Plan," with Vice Chairman Zhou Haibing and Beijing's executive vice mayor Xia Linmao, and roughly 100 representatives from AmCham China, the USCBC and more than 60 U.S. firms across agriculture, consumer electronics, biopharma, industrials and power ³. Officials walked through the 15th FYP outline, inbound-investment policy, the "two new" programs and consumption measures. That is an open commercial door pitched directly at U.S. business while the political channel stalls — a deliberate hedge, not a thaw.

The friction ran unchanged in parallel. CISA accused DeepSeek and Moonshot of making frontier-model theft a "core" strategy, which Mao Ning called an unfounded smear, and Anthropic said it banned accounts allegedly tied to Beijing using Claude for intelligence on overseas religious groups and Uyghurs in Syria ^4,5. Beijing's rebuttal remains the "pulling away the ladder" (抽梯子) counter — China "builds ladders," citing Belt and Road, zero-tariff and "export to China" policies — reinforced by China's 25 top innovation clusters ranking first for a fourth year in WIPO's Global Innovation Index ^4,5. On trade remedies, MOFCOM extended the anti-dumping probe into pecans from Mexico and the U.S. to March 25, 2027 ⁶.

Beijing's wider diplomacy fills out the Global South and neighborhood lanes. Li Qiang met Qatar's prime minister and foreign minister Mohammed during his Sept 7–8 visit, and Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Bin received a delegation of former senior Pakistani diplomats, invoking the 75th anniversary of ties and a "closer China–Pakistan community with a shared future" ^7,8. The NDRC's Zhou Haibing separately met Peru's energy and mines minister and Finland's economic affairs minister on minerals-adjacent and circular-economy cooperation, and CSRC chairman Wu Qing received Saudi Arabia's investment assistant minister on capital-market links ^9,10,11. These are relationship-maintenance meetings, not breakthroughs.

Implications: the dual track holds and has widened — a live but dateless leader-level U.S. channel, an open commercial door to U.S. business, an expanding AI-containment fight, and now a realized BRICS leadership turn with named AI and digital deliverables aimed at the Global South. The decisive missing piece is still an announced Xi–Trump meeting. Watch whether the BRICS AI open-source zone and digital cloud platform materialize as institutions rather than slogans, whether the Panama certification pilot spreads hemisphere-wide, whether the pecan probe ends in duties by March 2027, and whether Xi's AI-governance language is operationalized into rules the Global South actually adopts.