Chapter 1: What promises did Trump make regarding China and how did they unfold?
It's 2026, and Trump's got a lot of America's traditional adversaries on the ropes. Venezuela isn't in a position to demand much of anything right now. Cuba's trying to figure out if it's going to get Maduro'd. And now Trump's threatening to bomb Iran, where massive protests have the regime teetering on the brink.
The leaders of Iran called. They want a negotiation. I think they're tired of being beat up by the United States.
But you know who's on their front foot? China. China went toe-to-toe with Trump in the trade war over the last year and won. And on top of that, China's culture has been having a moment. Maybe you gifted a labubu last year? I don't think labubu's going away anytime soon. PopMart is going to keep cranking out these... strange, ugly, cute dolls.
China's surprisingly good 2025 and what it means for the future, coming up on Today Explained from Vox. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world flock to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. And they spend a week trying to sell each other on the weirdest gadgets you've ever seen in your entire life.
This week on The Verge Cast, we're talking all about everything happening at CES. From the TVs, to the AI gadgets, to the humanoid robots that everybody is hoping might someday do your laundry and wash your dishes. All that and much more on The Verge Cast, wherever you get podcasts.
This is Today Explained.
I'm Miles Bryan. Guest hosting today explained. John Zinn has been studying China for close to 20 years. He's with the Brookings Institution now, but he started out working for the CIA under George W. Bush and was the China director at the National Security Council for a few years in the Biden administration.
Recently, John wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs called How Xi, as in Xi Jinping, China's leader, played Trump. I started by asking him for his elevator pitch.
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Chapter 2: How did China's global position change during Trump's administration?
We've basically come full circle at the end of this trade war. We are back to status quo ante. We're basically in the same position, more or less, where we were with China a year ago. And I think what the Chinese have successfully done over time
is whittle down the conversation with the Trump administration so that we are talking instead about the trade imbalances, instead of China's overcapacity, never mind a whole suite of security issues like South China Sea and Taiwan, we are narrowly scoped and focused on particular sectors and particular firms like TikTok or particular products like soybeans.
And I think all of that is kind of a win for China. That puts them in a comfortable place right now in their discussions with the Trump administration. Okay, spicy. So if the first year of Trump, too, in China ends with China getting a lot of what it wants and the U.S. getting some soybean sales and maybe not much else, where does the story start?
Like, what did our relationship with China look like at the end of Biden's term? The relationship was at a relative high point for this period over the last 10 years or so of more overt and intense competition, right? The two presidents met in Peru.
And so, you know, our two countries cannot let any of this competition veer into conflict.
There was some limited cooperation underway on issues like fentanyl, which of course is a concern of the Trump administration.
We agreed that fentanyl as precursors will be curbed substantially and the pill presses. That's a big movement.
I think the big picture here is that it shows there are areas where the U.S. and China can agree And then what we saw as we got past election day and rounding the corner into the inauguration was the Biden administration kind of tying up some loose ends and tightening some of the export controls and technology controls on China. And these were pretty significant muscle movements.
The Biden administration reportedly set to announce a new set of last-minute expansive chip export restrictions today.
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Chapter 3: What strategies did China use to navigate the trade war with the U.S.?
perspective, is that they have, in fact, accrued a lot of leverage.
And so I find that really worrisome as we go into 2026, because if you look at what a lot of Chinese commentators and analysts are saying, they not only feel that they had a lot of leverage this past year and they exercised it to tremendous effect, I think better than they had expected, but that their position is actually improving this year.
I think they are very much mindful of the upcoming midterm elections. And so my theory about this for a while has been that they are working backwards from that. What they want to do is keep Trump invested in the diplomatic process.
I think on the premise that the closer we get to the midterm elections, the more leverage the Chinese side is going to have because Trump is going to want some kind of bigger deal. He's going to want something to show for all of his efforts. So it's not that the Chinese think in terms of centuries or imperial cycles.
They just pulled up Outlook calendar, I think, and realized one year from now is going to be the midterm election and Trump's not going to want to have this fall apart. They're just like us, brain poisoned journalists in America thinking about the two year cycle. That's fine. Exactly. What am I going to be doing from one year from now? John Zinn, China analyst at Brookings.
Coming up, China's soft power is on the rise too. Support for Today Explained comes from Delete Me. Delete Me, I'm told, makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. What does it do?
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Chapter 4: What were the outcomes of the U.S.-China trade negotiations?
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You're listening to Today Explained. I'm Don Wineland. I'm The Economist's China business and finance editor. I'm based in Shanghai. Okay, Don, in the first half of the show, we talked about China's hard power over the last year. You wrote for The Economist about China seeing an uptick in its cultural exports and growing soft power. How would you define that soft power?
Well, I mean, the first thing to say is that China massively underpunches on its cultural exports, right? I mean, this is the world's second biggest economy, an incredible manufacturing power unparalleled elsewhere. And yet on cultural exports, it's really not doing very well on that front, I would say. You know, I could read a list of Chinese films that came out this year.
And I mean, the vast majority of them, you would not know the names of them if I read them to you. Have you ever heard of the movie Detective Chinatown 1900? No, I have not. Or Dead to Rights. And there are a couple other things that happened in 2025 that may have caught your attention. So have you heard of Le Boo Boo before or Pop Mart? I have heard of Le Boo Boo's.
I have the one and only 24 karat gold libubu. Yeah, so this is something that's actually changing. You know, for many years, I don't think you would have known most of the sitcoms or movies or video games or toys that are being made in China, especially not by name. But China did much better on cultural exports in 2025 than it has in previous years.
Okay, so China's cultural exports are breaking through a little bit. Maybe we can run through the areas that that's happening. I feel like we should start with Labubu. I don't have any Labubus. To be honest, I'm not super Labubu curious, but I do see them everywhere. And I was surprised to learn in researching for this story that they originated in China. Are you a labubu guy?
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