Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Getting across Europe is most often quicker and easier by air than by rail. There are plenty

of national networks, but international connections are patchy. If the EU wants to meet its climate

targets then, it's going to have to get its track together.

And everybody on some level loves a particularly good picture of themselves. But in South

Korea people are spending serious sums to get what are called body profile photos, and

the obsession comes at more costs than that.

First up though.

Over the course of more than three hours yesterday, the leaders of the world's two superpowers

had what appeared to be a perfectly cordial online chat.

President Xi Jinping and Joe Biden exchanged smiles and waves and reassuring words that

couldn't have come at a better time.

This video chat matters because the relationship has been in bad shape since the Trump years

and hasn't recovered.

David Renny is the economist's Beijing bureau chief.

Low level contacts have been very frosty, even as tensions build on everything from human

rights and Hong Kong and Xinjiang and Taiwan. To the trade war that Joe Biden to China's

great frustration hasn't unwanned. We still have the same Trump tariffs, still have some

of the same export controls. So this was an attempt to try and stop this from escalating

further.

Recent communications have been, as you say, frosty, but how was it this time around?

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