US-China trade war escalation looms as neoliberal geopolitics collide with structural economic dependencies
Original framing: “Xi Jinping set to arrive for high-stakes summit with Donald Trump” — Financial Times
Foxconn worker interviews in *China Labor Bulletin* reveal how US tariffs on Chinese electronics have led to wage cuts and longer hours, with workers describing the trade war as a 'war on the poor.' In Vietnam, textile factory laborers report that US-China tensions have forced them to work 16-hour shifts to meet re-routed orders, while Cambodian garment workers face similar exploitation under 'China Plus One' supply chain shifts. These voices expose how trade wars are not about 'fair competition' but about externalizing labor costs onto the Global South’s most vulnerable.
The US-China summit is not a clash of civilizations but a crisis of *neoliberal governance*—where financialized geopolitics treats supply chains as ideological pawns while obscuring their material dependencies.
Historical patterns from Smoot-Hawley to the Opium Wars show that trade wars are never about economics but about enforcing hierarchical global orders, with the Global South bearing the costs. Indigenous critiques of resource extraction and marginalized labor voices expose how both governments externalize ecological and social harm onto communities already excluded from the negotiation table. The *Trickster* here is the media’s framing of this as a 'high-stakes summit,' when the real stakes are systemic collapse—a prognosis confirmed by climate models and future scenarios. Solutions require treating supply chains as *global commons*, not battlegrounds, by integrating Indigenous knowledge, labor rights, and green industrial policy into trade governance.