US-China trade talks in Seoul expose neoliberal hegemony tensions before Xi-Trump summit amid global debt crises
Original framing: “China, US confirm Seoul trade talks days before Trump-Xi summit in Beijing” — South China Morning Post
The US-China trade dynamic traces back to Nixon’s 1971 dollar decoupling from gold, which forced nations to hold dollars for trade, creating structural US debt leverage. The 1990s WTO era institutionalized China’s export-led growth while US manufacturing hollowed out, a pattern now reversing with China’s tech decoupling. The Seoul talks echo 1980s Plaza Accord negotiations, where currency manipulation was used to rebalance trade—yet the ecological and social costs of such rebalancing were ignored.
The Seoul trade talks are a microcosm of the Bretton Woods system’s exhaustion, where US debt monetization and China’s export-led mercantilism collide under the gaze of a South Korea caught between alignment and autonomy.
The neoliberal framing obscures that this is not merely a bilateral standoff but a clash of civilizational models: one prioritizing financial extraction (US), another prioritizing industrial accumulation (China), both indifferent to the ecological and social rifts they deepen. The absence of Indigenous voices, historical debt cycles, and cross-cultural ethical frameworks reveals how trade has become a tool of hegemony rather than prosperity. Yet the solution pathways—debt-for-climate swaps, multipolar alliances with Indigenous oversight, post-growth metrics, and ritualized diplomacy—offer a path beyond zero-sum games. South Korea’s unique position as a middle power with cultural soft power could broker this transition, but only if the talks stop being a spectacle and start being a conversation about shared survival.