China

1. Putin heads to Beijing
2. Boring, successful summit
3. Where China falls short
4. BRICS discord at talks
5. Taiwan tensions increase
6. Iran’s senior China envoy
7. West delinks supply chains
8. Data center IPO planned
9. Telecoms firms sell tokens
10. EVs push on fast charging

We watch the China watchers, and dig into the trend of Chinese men prioritizing self-care.

Farewell “win-win cooperation.” For more than a decade, Beijing’s nonstop intoning of the happy-sounding catchphrase — the foundational tenet of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s foreign policy — caused eyes to roll in Washington. American business executives complained that what it really meant was that China wins twice.

At his meeting with US President Donald Trump last week, Xi debuted a solemn new line: “Constructive strategic stability.”

After the summit, the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, posted that Xi’s new formula is “not a slogan.” Indeed, his revised language signals the ground has shifted under US-China relations once again, and Washington’s friends and allies around the region should be concerned about what comes next.

Beijing’s new framing appears intended to send both a message of reassurance — China seeks good relations with the US — and a warning: Don’t cross our red lines.

Taiwan will be the first major test of Xi’s new mantra. Trump is sitting on a decision over whether to deliver a $14 billion arms package to the island, having greenlit an $11 billion sale last year.

For Xi, that would be a deal-breaker, and although it’s anybody’s guess how Trump will ultimately decide, it appears that Xi got to him in Beijing. Asked by Fox News at the end of the trip whether he had made a decision on the sale, Trump replied: “No, I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China.”

Part of the thinking behind Beijing’s new emphasis on “constructive strategic stability” is that China needs time to prepare for the coming showdown by addressing its economic problems, including high debt, soaring rates of youth unemployment, and a real estate slump. Trump, too, needs breathing room. His urgent priority is to break China’s chokehold on rare earths, which gives Beijing the ability to turn America’s factories dark.

The new “constructive strategic stability” is, in fact, a delicate equilibrium.

Xi holds court as Putin visits

Russian President Vladimir Putin opens a visit to Beijing today that will focus on energy sales, cementing Xi Jinping’s status as a leader who holds court and whom fellow heads-of-state increasingly travel to see. The timing of the trip — days after Xi hosted US President Donald Trump — is coincidental, however, given Trump’s travels were rescheduled from March. It will also likely underscore the increasingly lopsided relationship between Russia and China: Core to the talks will be a gas pipeline long in the making, which Moscow hopes will be of renewed importance to Beijing given uncertainty in global energy supplies because of the Iran war. Also likely on the agenda: the Ukraine war, which Xi reportedly told Trump that Putin may regret.

Summit bottom line: Boring but good

Last week’s US-China summit was remarkable for how boring it was — and that’s a good thing, analysts said. Few major deals were agreed at the talks between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and those that were forged largely fell short of expectations. But the superpowers setting a floor under what has been a tumultuous relationship amounted to a success. On China, “Trump has evolved from belligerence toward a more complicated mix of rivalry and cooperation,” Fareed Zakaria wrote, while Foreign Policy’s deputy editor noted that the “relative stability of the US-China relationship seems secure for now.” Still, questions remain over key issues on trade, and it’s unclear whether “preliminary understandings actually survive implementation,” Trivium analysts said.

China lags the US in financial power

While China and the US are commonly cast as rivals on equal footing, Beijing remains fundamentally outmatched by Washington’s financial power, a leading Financial Times columnist argued. China may be a military and economic powerhouse, but the yuan has “gained little traction as an international currency,” Ruchir Sharma wrote: It accounts for roughly 2% of global foreign exchange reserves, while the US dollar’s share is around 58%. Global banks have forecast a strengthening yuan, but Beijing’s tightly controlled financial system limits the currency’s ability to challenge the dollar’s dominance, which the US leverages for geopolitical influence. “China will remain an incomplete superpower until it can match this financial firepower,” Sharma argued.

BRICS countries at loggerheads

The BRICS group failed to agree on a consensus statement following a meeting of foreign ministers in New Delhi, underscoring the geopolitical limits of anti-Western blocs in which China plays a major role. The latest talks had been hamstrung by the participation of Iran and the UAE: Both are new members of the bloc, and each has hit the other militarily during the Middle East conflict. China sent a relatively low-level delegation to the meeting, which one veteran analyst attributed to BRICS’ struggles to articulate a response to the Iran war, as well as Beijing’s efforts to avoid antagonizing US President Donald Trump — who has chastised the group for seemingly wanting to undermine American dominance — during his trip to China.

Philippines risks China ire

The Philippines president said his country would likely get involved in any conflict involving Taiwan, comments that could draw Beijing’s ire. The remarks come before he travels to Tokyo to discuss security cooperation; Japan’s own leader angered Beijing by saying that, if necessary, her country could help defend Taiwan, which China claims as a renegade province. Though Beijing has emerged as Asia’s preeminent military power — a former CIA analyst said it was “hard to point to an area” where China wasn’t dominant — an attempt to take the island isn’t guaranteed success. A “failure of imagination led Russia to disaster in Ukraine. A similar failure in Beijing could lead China to disaster in Taiwan,” the Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman wrote.

Iran deepens China ties

Iran appointed its parliament speaker as the country’s special envoy to China, ostensibly a way for Tehran to showcase its commitment to Beijing. The announcement, which came on the heels of the US-China leaders’ summit, lacked details on the precise role Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf would play. But his relative seniority — a veteran of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, he was Tehran’s lead negotiator in April talks with Washington — signals that “the Islamic Republic now treats Beijing as a central platform for its postwar diplomacy,” one leading analyst argued. Yet Tehran recently seized a vessel owned by a Chinese security firm near the Strait of Hormuz, suggesting “its favors for friends have limits,” The Wall Street Journal wrote.

West eyes supply chain autonomy

Western governments intensified efforts to delink supply chains from China. Australia ordered six investors with links to Beijing to divest their holdings of a rare earths firm that is central to efforts by Washington and Canberra to loosen China’s stranglehold on the mining and processing of the minerals. And the EU is reportedly readying plans to require companies in the bloc to diversify their suppliers in order to reduce dependence on Chinese firms. The US, meanwhile, is pressing ahead with a looming deadline banning defense companies from sourcing rare earths from China, despite industry protests that the sector is not yet ready to do so. A “global ‘land grab’ for rare earths is accelerating,” the Financial Times said.

DayOne weighs dual IPO

Global data center operator DayOne is weighing a dual IPO listing in New York and Singapore, amid scrutiny of Chinese-origin firms using Singapore as an international base. A spin-off of a Shanghai-based company, DayOne is headquartered in Singapore and aims to raise $5 billion as the city-state introduced new rules to boost Asian IPOs, the Financial Times reported. The proposed listing comes as Beijing cracked down on Meta’s purchase of Chinese AI startup Manus, which had relocated there — a practice dubbed “Singapore-washing.” DayOne’s investors, however, don’t expect Chinese regulators to target the company’s IPO, which is set to be one of Singapore’s biggest listings in 10 years, though Reuters reported that DayOne’s plans are not yet concrete.

China telecom giants charge for AI tokens

Chinese telecom giants are planning to charge consumers for AI tokens, capitalizing on the AI boom. China Telecom introduced packages targeting casual AI users, developers, and businesses, citing “token operations [as] its central strategic focus.” Two other carriers are also betting that tokens — the units of data processed by AI models — will become the next billable unit of the digital economy, much like cellular data once did, the South China Morning Post reported. In March, China settled on the term ciyuan as the official translation for tokens, a move suggesting Beijing is looking to shape the rules of the AI economy and expand its efforts to counter the US dollar’s dominance in global commerce to digital realms.

China EV firms race for new tech

China’s EV juggernauts are focusing on speeding up charge times and increasing the size of batteries in hybrids, but next-generation storage technology is likely some years away, a new report noted. Industry behemoths BYD and CATL are taking different approaches to cutting EV charging times, Wood Mackenzie analysts said. BYD is deploying a broad “flash-charging ecosystem,” while the latter is pushing fast charging alongside battery-swapping technology. Timelines for the deployment of solid-state and sodium-ion batteries, seen as the next step in cutting-edge technology, have been delayed, however. At the same time, a moribund domestic economy has driven Chinese EV makers abroad ever faster: BYD is in talks with Stellantis, for example, to take over the European firms’ underutilized factories.

Every week, we ask a different expert what they’re focused on. Today, we’re talking to Joe Ngai, chairman of McKinsey Greater China.

Every week, we dig through China-focused newsletters and podcasts, and bring you key takeaways from the Sinologist community.

• Policymakers worried about Chinese dominance of minerals processing are thinking of the problem backwards, and should instead focus on the country’s astounding dominance of minerals consumption: “It encourages policymakers to believe they have a supply problem when they really have a demand problem because the industries that actually consume minerals are in China. We buy the finished products.” — Volt Insight
• A reading of China’s central bank quarterly monetary policy report suggests it is going to be less tolerant of volatility, and will focus instead on stability: Given the uncertainty fueled by the Iran war, “the PBoC is now saying, ‘Well, one thing that we can do is limit the uncertainty in the currency space.’” — Trivium China
• US President Donald Trump is “Chinamaxxing.” In promoting glossy images from the summit that ostensibly demonstrate Xi Jinping’s deference to Trump, the White House’s social media account instead risks glorifying “China as a dazzling and imposing peer superpower” of the US. — Julian Gewirtz

• South Korea’s president meets with the Japanese prime minister Tuesday, with oil supplies and regional security on the agenda.
• Foreign ministers from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation member states gather for a trade forum in Suzhou on Wednesday.
• Hong Kong’s Cheung Chau Bun Scrambling Competition, in which competitors race to collect traditional desserts from a 45-foot bun tower, takes place on Sunday.

Chinese men are learning to spoil themselves. As more of them live alone and delay marriage, those who might have spent money on romantic relationships are instead splurging on skincare, fragrances, fitness equipment, and other self-care luxuries. The trend is tied to an overall increase in male consumption in the country: 2025 saw an 11.4% year-over-year increase in online spending per male consumer and men, for the first time, accounted for a majority of online Singles’ Day consumers. Facing increased workplace competition, where clean looks signify discipline, men are “reallocating budgets inward,” a China-focused consultant told Jing Daily. Mirroring Western “looksmaxxing” trends, a popular RedNote hashtag proclaims there are “no ugly men, only lazy ones.”