U.S.–China & China's Diplomacy

The U.S.–China file did not move this cycle. Beijing's standing line — head-of-state diplomacy has "irreplaceable strategic guidance" and "the two sides maintain communication on arrangements for head-of-state interaction within the year" — was restated verbatim on Sept 10, still with no date or venue for a Xi–Trump meeting ¹. That absence is the frame for everything else: with the political channel stalled, Beijing is working its Global South and neighborhood lanes harder, and the durable read is a hedge that is widening, not a thaw.

The BRICS turn is now realized rather than staged. Xi Jinping attended the 18th leaders' meeting in New Delhi on Sept 12–13, spoke in both sessions, and summarized 20 years of cooperation with three keywords — self-reliance, sticking together, fruitful results — casting the grouping as the most influential emerging-market platform and a "first phalanx" of the Global South ^2,3. The concrete deliverables are China-led: a BRICS AI open-source zone (金砖国家人工智能开源专区), a BRICS digital industry cloud platform, and a BRICS youth sci-tech innovation exchange plan, pitched as capacity-building so Global South states "benefit equally" from emerging technology. China takes the chair and hosts the 19th leaders' meeting, billed as BRICS' third "golden decade" ². This is institutional ambition, and it is aimed at exactly the constituency Washington's tech controls exclude.

The mechanism by which Beijing converts U.S. containment into a developing-world grievance is now explicit. On the reported U.S. pilot in Panama for a global AI supply-chain certification and traceability platform covering semiconductors, critical minerals and AI infrastructure, the MFA called it a closed, exclusionary "small circle" serving geopolitical calculation and harming Global South technology development, countering with a "just and reasonable" AI governance system for Latin America and the Caribbean ¹. In parallel, the friction ran unchanged: CISA accused DeepSeek and Moonshot of making frontier-model theft a "core" strategy, which Mao Ning called an unfounded smear and answered with the "pulling away the ladder" (抽梯子) counter — China "builds ladders" through Belt and Road, zero-tariff and "export to China" policies — reinforced by 25 Chinese clusters topping WIPO's Global Innovation Index for a fourth year ⁴. Anthropic separately said it banned accounts allegedly tied to Beijing using Claude to gather intelligence on overseas religious groups and Uyghurs in Syria ³.

The business-facing door stayed open and concrete. On Sept 10 the NDRC held its high-level roundtable with U.S. multinationals in China under the theme "embracing the 15th Five-Year Plan," with Vice Chairman Zhou Haibing and Beijing executive vice mayor Xia Linmao and roughly 100 representatives from AmCham China, the USCBC and 60-plus U.S. firms; officials walked through the 15th FYP outline, inbound-investment policy, the "two new" programs and consumption measures ⁵. On trade remedies, MOFCOM extended the anti-dumping probe into U.S. and Mexican pecans to March 25, 2027 ⁶. Open commercial door, stalled political channel, live trade-remedy docket — the same three-track design.

The clearest new signal in this batch is a doubling-down on Peru. The day after Zhou Haibing met Peruvian energy and mines minister Guillermo Xinye at the NDRC on minerals and investment, National Energy Administration head Wang Hongzhi met the same minister — in China for the APEC energy ministers' meeting — covering oil and gas, power, renewables, new-type storage and green mining, with language about maintaining "global industrial and supply chain stability" ^7,8. Pair that with Saudi capital-market talks at the CSRC, Finland on circular economy, Qatar's PM and foreign minister in Beijing, and continued Nepal disaster aid, and the pattern is resource-and-market courtship of exactly the partners U.S. certification regimes are trying to ring-fence ^9,10,11. Provincial diplomacy — Liaoning's Global Industrial Internet Conference and Guangdong at the Xiamen CIFIT — is routine packaging, not breakthrough ^12,13.

Implications: nothing here changes the standing judgment. The dual track holds — a live but dateless leader-level U.S. channel, an open door to U.S. business, an expanding AI-containment fight, and a BRICS chairmanship with named AI and digital deliverables aimed at the Global South. What is new is the depth of the minerals-and-energy courtship of Latin America, which reads as direct insurance against U.S. supply-chain certification. Watch whether the BRICS AI open-source zone and digital cloud platform become institutions rather than slogans, whether the Panama certification pilot spreads hemisphere-wide, whether the pecan probe ends in duties by March 2027, and whether an announced Xi–Trump meeting ever supplies the missing piece.