I'm John Batchel with Mary Kistel, a former senior advisor to the Secretary of State,

now at the Hudson Institute, to comment on the recent embassy by the President of the United States to Beijing, conversations with Xi Jinping, and now declarations by members of the cabinet that relations are good with the People's Republic of China.

Mary, is there a trade dispute or not?

And where is that dispute that has been in suspension, I believe, for about a year?

Well, there has been a very big strategic shift over this administration, but also Biden and Trump

won.

And that's, I think, that we've done away with the pretension that China wants economic

reform or to adopt any of the really

core tenets of capitalism, notably a true rule of law, a true property rights, etc.

Those hopes are dead. And so I think, you know, the main takeaways from the Trump

Xi summit were the following. First, the Chinese want something close to what they call strategic stability, which means don't change anything.

And if you do try to take action against us to punish us for our maligned behavior, we can wave our arms around and scream that you're upsetting stability.

And unfortunately, the U.S. side kind of

tacitly agreed to that. I think that was a mistake. Secondly, on the U.S. side, the president

proposed a board of trade, which is, again, an admission that we need managed trade with this

very large nuclear armed power that is noncompliant with

various treaties that is very aggressive towards its own people, its neighbors, and us.

And we're just going to throw – this idea that we're going to have any kind of free and fair

trade is just out the window. And I think that's very sensible. I wish that we

could go further. I wish that as a U.S. federal government, we could say Beijing is an enemy

because they say so themselves. They consider us an enemy. And therefore, we need policy

deriving from that fundamental truth. We're not there yet. We're in this gray zone area where we're

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