Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Mr. Trump Goes to China

China analysts were working overtime last week as Donald Trump flew to Beijing for two days of meetings with Xi Jinping. While there are innumerable issues causing friction around the edges, it seems to have been a cordial and uneventful trip overall. Both men made some carefully planned remarks (Trump stuck to his script), the leaders had photos taken together, they ate duck.

Even though nothing remarkably good or bad happened at the summit, there’s still plenty to say about it—I’ve linked to a number of stories and commentaries below.

Thanks for joining me this week.

Recommendations

China Stories

Eliot Chen, “No Country for American Reporters”

Julian Gewirtz, “Xi Is Planning for China’s Final Victory Over the U.S.”

Dan Kurtz-Phelan, “What the Trump-Xi Summit Won’t Solve: A Conversation With Orville Schell”

Louisa Lim, “Scarred in Hong Kong”

Yi-Ling Liu, “The Shared Feeling of Being Harvested by the Future”

Hannah Miao, with photographs by Gilles Sabrié, “The Factory Town Known as China’s Furniture Capital Is Fighting to Survive”

Evan Osnos, “The Pageantry and Flattery of Donald Trump’s Trip to China”

Anton Troianovski and David E. Sanger, “Trump’s ‘Learning Curve’ on China Ends With Conciliation at Summit”

In China, the viable agency to steer the future is the state, and state capacity absorbs AI differently. AI in China is not seen as an elite technology to be contained, nor as an anti-egalitarian threat. It is seen as the state’s instrument of Darwinian upgrade — and the instrument does not get to interpret itself. That work belongs to whoever holds the mandate. The companies build. The state then decides what it has been built for. — Afra Wang, “Mandate of AI”

Yaqiu Wang, “The China That the West Doesn’t See”

Maya Yang and Lucy Campbell, “Photo of US-China delegation criticized over absence of women: ‘masculine, militarized and exclusionary’”

Viola Zhou, “The Chinese whiz kids of Silicon Valley”

Wanderings Around the World

For $180, a permit allows camping from 15 September through 15 April. At La Posa, that price includes trash collection, vault toilets and a dump station. It’s worth pausing on the math. For less than the cost of a single night in many American hotels, a person can legally live on public lands in the desert for seven months. — Joshua Jackson, “The Desert Safety Net”

Jordan Kisner, with photographs and video by Sasha Arutyunova, “At a Los Angeles Museum, Giving New Life to Dead Animals”

Jill Lepore, “Writing the Trump Years into History”

Josh Levin, with photographs by Kevin Wurm, “The Savannah Bananas Bring Back a Negro Leagues Team”

Maggie Mertens, “Why Can’t Writers Seem to Quit Substack?”

Alison Sider, “The World’s Highest-Flying Repo Men Are Collecting Spirit Airlines’ Jets”

Featured photo: Tiananmen Square, Beijing, December 15, 2012.