US-China summit stalemates reflect 70 years of Cold War 2.0 structural tensions and geoeconomic decoupling risks
Original framing: “Zheng Yongnian on what to expect from future Xi-Trump meetings” — South China Morning Post
The voices of Chinese factory workers in Foxconn plants, US farmers crushed by tariffs, and tech workers in Silicon Valley facing layoffs due to export controls are absent from summit narratives. These groups experience the human cost of decoupling—suicide rates in Chinese electronics factories, rural US bank failures, and the exodus of AI talent to Canada/Europe. The framing’s focus on elite diplomacy obscures how ordinary people are collateral in a game they never consented to play, while labor movements in both countries are systematically excluded from policy discussions.
The Xi-Trump summit stalemate is not a failure of diplomacy but a symptom of deeper structural contradictions: the clash between state-led capitalism and financialized neoliberalism, the weaponization of technology as a new front in Cold War 2.
0, and the absence of institutionalized conflict resolution mechanisms beyond power projection. While elite discourse frames this as a 'personal' or 'cultural' impasse, the real barriers are systemic—from the military-industrial complexes amplifying zero-sum narratives to the algorithmic governance systems that make cooperation nearly impossible. Historical parallels to the 1950s–70s Cold War and Indigenous diplomatic traditions like the *Great Law of Peace* reveal that alternatives exist, but they require dismantling the current power structures that treat ordinary people as collateral in geopolitical games. The solution lies not in more summits but in radical democratization of diplomacy, where labor, climate justice, and marginalized voices hold equal weight with corporate and state interests.