Duo’s lingo: what to watch for in Trump-Xi summit
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.5 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2026
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The meeting between President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping will set the tone for three more this year. We examine what and what not to expect. Pepsi has been losing ground to Coca Cola recently; to catch up, it may have to become more like its rival. And this year’s Venice Biennale is uncomfortably besieged by geopolitics.
Guests and host:
- Simon Rabinovitch, Beijing bureau chief
- Shera Avi-Yonah, business correspondent
- Alexandra Suich Bass, culture editor
- Rosie Blau, co-host of “The Intelligence”
- Jason Palmer, co-host of “The Intelligence”
Topics covered:
- Trump/Xi summit, geopolitics
- Coca Cola, Pepsi, business
- Venice Biennale, culture
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Economist. |
| 0:09.6 | Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. |
| 0:12.7 | I'm Jason Palmer. |
| 0:13.7 | And I'm Rosie Bloor. |
| 0:19.2 | Today on the show, the latest in the century-long Coke v. Pepsi battle |
| 0:23.1 | and a curtain razor on a particularly fraught Venice Bienale. |
| 0:31.7 | First up, though. |
| 0:46.3 | Thank you. First up, though. Tomorrow, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping will meet in Beijing. The two-day summit originally scheduled for April was delayed by the Iran War. |
| 0:51.3 | Even so, both sides seemed determined to make it happen. The meeting is the |
| 0:57.0 | first of four between Trump and Xi planned for this year, a sign of the urgency both sides feel |
| 1:03.2 | about calming this consequential but often tempestuous relationship. The Chinese-American relationship |
| 1:10.5 | was in a really, really bad way last year. They |
| 1:14.1 | were on the brink of a massive economic conflict that really threatened a global recession. |
| 1:20.8 | Simon Rubinovich is our Beijing bureau chief and Chowang columnist. They've walked back from |
| 1:26.6 | the ledge of that, and the question for this year |
| 1:29.3 | is, are they going to be able to build something bigger, more constructive and more sustainable |
| 1:34.3 | out of that? So just fill in a bit more of that context for us for a minute, Simon. Why were |
| 1:42.7 | US-China relations quite so bad? So China and America |
| 1:47.0 | have been in a on-again, off-again trade war, going back to Donald Trump's first term. |
| 1:53.0 | And at the start of 2025, things were looking really quite dangerous. We got to a point where |
| 1:58.9 | both countries had tariffs of more than 100% on each other, |
| 2:02.6 | effectively threatening a stop to all bilateral trade. At the same time, China was fighting back |
... |
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