US-China bilateral relations – Artifex.News

U.S. and China should stay clear-eyed on AI cooperation and competition, says Scott Bessent

admin — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 07:12:00 +0000

U.S. Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent gestures whle speaking at the U.S.-China Relations Gala Dinner in New York on November 10, 2026
| Photo Credit: AP

The United States and ‌China should harbor no illusions about their differences on artificial intelligence as they navigate cooperation to mitigate the technology’s risks while competing for Artificial Intelligence (AI) supremacy, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said ⁠on Tuesday (November 10, 2026).

Mr. Bessent, who will travel to China next week for U.S. President Donald Trump’s third meeting this year with Chinese President Xi Jinping, said in prepared remarks to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations in New York that he wanted to “build ‌a constructive relationship on the basis of balance and reciprocity.”

The meeting in Shenzhen, to be held on the sidelines of the November 18-19 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders summit, will advance a new bilateral ‌dialogue on “superintelligence”, or SI, Bessent said, using the Trump administration’s preferred term for the technology.

The dialogue is meant ‌to ⁠guard against shared risks and “prevent a misunderstanding between our two systems,” Bessent said.

“We also expect ⁠to exchange best practices for evaluating and testing advanced models before their release, and for keeping human judgment firmly in command of this technology,” he said, adding the two sides had agreed to establish a direct channel for alerting each other to serious incidents.

Mr. Trump and /Mr. Xi agreed on the new AI alert ‌system during their previous meeting at the White House in September, but Trump at the time also said he was reluctant to add new guardrails because he wanted to preserve US leadership.

“As SI advances, so will the need to engage in new areas of risk management — and to demonstrate how two nations ‌can reconcile the demands of competition with the responsibilities of leadership,” Mr. Bessent said.

“As we do so, we should harbor no illusions about the differences between the United States and China. As I stated earlier, our interests will not always coincide. And our approach to every challenge, likewise, will ⁠not always converge,” he added.

Nvidia questions

Mr. Bessent’s remarks made no mention of the controversy surrounding Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who is facing an investigation by the AI chipmaker’s board after a New York Times report that he had an affair ‌with a businesswoman suspected by U.S. security services of being a Chinese intelligence asset.

China’s Foreign Ministry has called the spying accusations “groundless” and “a smear.”

Nvidia has said its board has no reason to believe U.S. national security or company secrets were compromised and that Huang has committed to cooperating with the internal review. Huang has told employees he was unfaithful to his wife, but provided no details about the relationship.

While Mr. Huang was present at the Trump-Xi summits in Beijing in May and in Washington in September, it was unclear if Trump would bring him ‌to the APEC summit.

A fourth Trump-Xi summit this year is expected in December at the U.S.-hosted G20 summit in Miami.

Tariff cuts, trade deficit

In remarks that referred to the initial U.S. trade voyage to China in 1784 to trade American ginseng for Chinese tea, porcelain and silk, Bessent said that the U.S.-China ⁠relationship would be sustained by “the wisdom — and the will — to recognize where common purpose must prevail over competing interests.”

Bessent referred to ⁠other trade initiatives agreed during the two previous Trump-Xi summits, including the establishment of a “Board of Trade” to determine mutual tariff cuts on $30 billion of non-sensitive goods in each direction, and China’s pledged purchases ‌of US farm goods.

A similarly structured “Board of Investment” will provide a structured forum for issues including market access for American companies in China and “increased predictability for Chinese companies,” he said.

He reiterated that the US trade deficit with China remains a source of friction, but the US objective is to “de-risk, not to decouple” from trade with China.

Published – November 11, 2026 08:15 am IST

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What the U.S. midterms mean for ties with China

admin — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 02:30:00 +0000

A sweeping victory for Democrats in U.S. midterm elections this week, giving them control of Congress, presents both an opportunity and challenge for top rival China, analysts say.

Here is how the outcome of the vote, which offers the Democratic Party the power to stymie President Donald Trump’s maverick foreign policy, could impact the thorny relationship between Washington and Beijing:

U.S. midterm elections 2026 LIVE updates

Will tariffs be limited?

Winning control of both houses in the U.S. Congress puts Democrats in a position to limit Mr. Trump’s liberal use of tariffs on Chinese products in the two years he has left in office, analysts say.

That could be a potential blow to Mr. Trump, who has wielded duties throughout a frenzied US-China trade war before the two sides reached a truce, set to expire in January.

If Democrats limit Mr. Trump, that means he “will be less able to leverage a tariff card in negotiations with China”, said Wu Xinbo, dean at the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

However, Democrats will also have to weigh their actions against the popularity of Mr. Trump’s tariffs among U.S. businesses.

Congress will “take every opportunity to thwart (Mr. Trump’s policies) over the next two years”, said Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

But Democrats will still have to tread carefully on further restricting tariffs that “are popular with unions, blue-collar workers and small businesses… who have historically been a base constituency for the Democrats”, Mr. Thompson said.

Congress will be “less inclined to support measures that would sharply escalate pressure on China if doing so risks raising costs for American consumers and businesses or increasing the likelihood of conflict”, said Patricia Kim, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Taiwan a ‘game changer’?

The issue of Taiwan, the U.S.-backed democratic island claimed by Beijing, could be a “game changer”, said Neil Shearing, group chief economist at Capital Economics.

Washington is Taipei’s most important security backer and has sold billions of dollars’ worth of arms to Taiwan that the island would use to fend off a potential Chinese attack.

But Mr. Trump threw the U.S. stance into question in May when he declared that U.S. arms sales to Taiwan could be a bargaining chip in talks with China. His administration has since delayed for months a $14-billion batch of weapons.

China could use the remaining two years of Mr. Trump’s presidency to increase pressure on Taiwan, particularly if Beijing “judges that Washington is distracted or that Trump would be willing to agree terms to not intervene”, Shearing wrote in a note.

Mr. Trump, who recently hailed his “great friendship” with China’s President Xi Jinping, has so far resisted political pressure from Democrats — and some Republican lawmakers — to greenlight the arms package.

But a Democrat-controlled Congress “may force Trump to resume arms sales to Taiwan next year”, Wu said.

“If that happens, that will also undermine the stability of U.S.-China relationship.”

Alternatively, for China, renewed support of Taipei from the U.S. Congress may be “a stronger incentive for (Beijing) to play it safer with Taiwan”, said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute.

Nevertheless, Thompson pointed out, while Congress can pass bills requiring Mr. Trump to approve an arms sale, the president retains the power to veto it “or simply ignore it”.

Will Beijing treat Trump as a lame duck?

From China’s perspective, even though Mr. Trump has been politically weakened by the midterms, Beijing is unlikely to change its strategy towards working with him, analysts say.

“Beijing is likely to continue cultivating him through high-profile, leader-to-leader engagement with Xi Jinping, viewing this as the least costly way to manage relations with Washington,” said Kim.

“Neither Beijing nor Washington appears to expect or seek a fundamental improvement in bilateral relations,” she added.

Tsang of the SOAS China Institute said “Trump being relegated to lame-duck status will be used by the Chinese to put more pressure on him”.

But, he added, Beijing is “calculating” and “would not want to push too hard and trigger Trump behaving totally irresponsibly”.

Published – November 05, 2026 08:00 am IST

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