I'm John Batch who is my colleague Gordon Chang at Gordon G. Chang and Charles Burton,

the author of the new book, The Beaver and the Dragon. Gentlemen, the State Department likes to work ahead of time and make everything signed sealed and delivered so that the leadership can sit there, smile, wave to the cameras, and sign paper. If that document exists, what does it look like? Gordon, do you have an understanding of

this agreement that may or may not come out of a meeting that may or may not happen?

At the moment, we don't have a good sense of it. We know that Treasury Secretary Besson on

Sunday and Monday met the Chinese vice premier, Holt LeLefong in Paris. I'm sure that they were

talking about every detail, but we don't know what it looks like. And given the problems between

China and the United States, I think the best that could be hoped for from those who want trade

would be an extension of the October 30 agreement

between Trump and Xi Jinping that was hammered out in Busan, South Korea. In other words,

a trade truce of a year may be extended to two years. Charles, do you have a sense of what's in the

document? Well, I mean, I think that certainly the United States would like China to commit to purchase more American agricultural commodities, for example, soybeans and so on.

And I think that the United States would like China to give some commitments with regard to critical minerals, although I think China's plans are to make these temporary.

Of course, what the U.S. should be doing is collaborating with Canada in the massive investment

necessary to extract and process critical minerals which exist in North America.

But we're not seeing that as yet.

I mean, you know, even the limited number of rarers that Canada does produce

are sent to China for processing because the processing facilities are not available in Canada.

It's similar with Canada's dependence on China for agricultural commodity sales like

the canola, which keeps coming up.

I was in the Canadian Parliament a couple of weeks ago, sitting next to the head of the

Canadian Canola Association, and he said that there

would be the potential for Canada to convert 75% of its canola seeds to biofuel by sending

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