China’s empty boardroom in Washington, and its crowded auto market at home

We'll start with Xi's Washington visit, which was the talk of the town in both Washington and Beijing as the leaders of the world's two largest economies met for their second summit this year.

rather than

focus on what got said and done or maybe what didn't get said and done, we'll zero in on one thing that was notably absent, which was the absence of any Chinese business delegation with Xi.

Now, this was despite reports in the week before the summit saying Xi would bring a delegation with leaders from the likes of smartphone giant Xiaomi and cattle, which is the world's largest EV battery maker.

So, Renee, everyone's guessing what may have happened is there was plenty of chatter about this delegation in the week before the summit, and then it just never showed up.

Some are saying China took too long to finalize its list of attendees, and others are saying the U.S. didn't want to let the face of Chinese businesses be seen so prominently at such a sensitive time.

Do you have any, you

know, throw your interpretation into the ring with everybody else? Oh yeah, why not? Go for it.

A few things.

First of all, I've done a bit of research and basically what I have found out is that typically, historically, business people never really traveled or extremely rarely traveled with Xi Jinping on official state trips.

So this seems to either have been a departure from tradition, if I can call it tradition, or media fantasizing, or companies affabulating and trying to create a debate or a discussion so that it would force the hand of politicians and get them invited.

That's one possibility.

But I think probably more importantly, If you look at some of the companies that were going to attend or were rumored to potentially join on the trip and so on, it seems more plausible that some of them, that the U.S. government administration objected to some of them being on the trip on account of national security and the product of some of those companies having dual purpose, which is, I guess, diplomatic language to mean that they could be used by the Chinese army, the PLA, or the surveillance apparatus of China and so on.

So that's a second reason, which is probably as plausible as the first one, assuming that What I have read about past practice on official travel around the world seems to be actually what happened as opposed to people running out of time or whatever.

Okay.

Well, how about that? I mean, the lack of Chinese business leaders was really a sharp contrast to the attendance of all kinds of U.S.

business leaders.

You know, we saw people like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and

quite a few

others.

This does seem quite one-sided.

You know, what kind of signal does this send, you know, to the U.S.? Allowing all its top business leaders to come to this event and know if they're the ones who stopped the Chinese, you know, especially after China really seems to be bending over backwards lately to welcome big Western business leaders, both with and without presidential

visits.

Companies going on state visits do not create jobs, right? So that's one thing.

China obviously opens its arms fully, partially, honestly or not, to foreign business leaders to come to China because China wants the technology and they want the jobs and all of that.