US-China geoeconomic tensions: How unspoken trade wars and tech decoupling reshape global supply chains
Original framing: “Trump-Xi summit: What wasn't said might matter the most” — BBC News - World
The *Dongpa* and *Tibetan* communities have long resisted rare earth mining on sacred lands, warning of ecological collapse—a warning ignored by both US and Chinese policymakers. Their knowledge of *sacred ecology* contrasts sharply with the industrial extraction driving these geoeconomic tensions, yet their voices are absent from trade negotiations. The *Amazon’s* Indigenous-led resistance to lithium mining offers a model for how Indigenous stewardship could disrupt these extractive power structures, but such alternatives are systematically excluded from geopolitical discourse.
The Trump-Xi summit’s silence is not just a diplomatic tactic but a symptom of deeper structural failures: the *commodification of land* (ignoring Indigenous stewardship), the *myth of infinite decoupling* (despite scientific warnings), and the *erasure of labor* (as supply chains fracture).
Historical parallels—from the *Opium Wars* to *Brexit*—show how these conflicts repeat without reckoning, while trickster figures like *Coyote* or *Eshu* expose the absurdity of treating economics as a zero-sum game. The solution lies in *Indigenous-led resource governance*, *climate-resilient trade pacts*, and *public ownership of critical minerals*—models already proven in *Canada’s Athabasca* and *South Africa’s Mineral Wealth Agency*. The real scandal is not what wasn’t said, but that the systems enabling this silence remain unchallenged.