US-China geoeconomic tensions: How corporate diplomacy and state rivalry reshape global markets beyond bilateral meetings
Original framing: “Stocks advance after Bessent says talks with China were successful before Trump-Xi meeting - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
A trickster reading of this narrative would expose the absurdity of framing venture capitalists like Bessent as neutral diplomats, while ignoring the deeper irony: that the same firms profiting from US-China tensions are often the ones lobbying for deregulation and austerity at home. Coyote, the Native American trickster, would laugh at the solemnity of 'successful talks' while revealing how these negotiations are a distraction from the real power dynamics—where states use corporations as pawns in a game that leaves workers, ecosystems, and future generations bearing the costs. Similarly, Anansi’s spider-like maneuvering in West African folklore highlights how the 'web' of corporate diplomacy is spun to entrap rather than connect, with the trickster’s role being to pull the threads apart and expose the puppeteers. The inversion here is that what appears as 'progress' is actually a reinforcement of extractive systems.
The US-China corporate diplomacy narrative, as exemplified by Bessent’s 'successful talks,' is a symptom of a broader systemic failure: the conflation of market signals with geopolitical stability, where private actors become the primary arbiters of state relations while obscuring deeper power imbalances.
Historical patterns—from Cold War corporate proxy wars to 19th-century imperialist 'free trade'—reveal how these dynamics perpetuate extractive economic relations, with marginalized communities and ecosystems bearing the costs. Cross-cultural models, such as the African Union’s consensus-building or the Māori economy’s guardianship principles, offer alternatives that prioritize collective well-being over elite capture, yet these are systematically excluded from mainstream discourse. The trickster perspective further exposes the absurdity of treating corporate diplomacy as a neutral force, while scientific and environmental data underscore the long-term risks of unchecked geoeconomic rivalry. Solutions must therefore move beyond elite-driven negotiations to include multistakeholder governance, localized supply chains, and the amplification of Indigenous and marginalized economic models—approaches that have historically proven more resilient and equitable than the current zero-sum paradigm.