asiabits
Posts
🟠 Xi meets Trump: 5 key takeaways

🟠 Xi meets Trump: 5 key takeaways

Asiabits News

September 28, 2026

Xi in Washington: the trade truce only runs to January

Photo: The White House / Andrea Hanks

Fighter jets and bombers flew over the White House on Thursday. Soldiers in colonial uniforms lined the Rose Garden. Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Jensen Huang sat at the state dinner.

Xi Jinping was back in Washington for the first time in eleven years. What came out of it is an extension of two months.

The trade truce expires on January 10

Both sides agreed on a truce in South Korea last autumn. It would have run out on November 10. It now holds until January 10, 2027.

There is no new agreement. Tariffs, Chinese purchases, rare earths and the technology restrictions all move into the next round of talks. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calls it "more time to see what we can do on the economic front".

Rare earths: the deliveries are running behind

China promised not to tighten its export controls on rare earths for a year. The volumes are still arriving slowly. Magnet shipments to the US fell again in August, the US Trade Representative reports.

China controls the chain from mining through separation to the finished magnet, and estimates say that will hold until at least 2030. European manufacturers face the same bottleneck. Anyone building electric motors or wind turbines depends on the same plants.

The farm pledges are $17 billion short

China is buying the 25 million tonnes of soybeans as agreed. On the other farm goods Beijing is behind, and the contract puts that at $17 billion.

This is Trump's most visible lever. Farm states such as Iowa and Illinois voted for him.

AI: Xi wants rules, Trump wants none

"Both China and the US are leading nations in AI. We have both the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good," Xi said at the welcoming ceremony. He pushed for control and for a standing dialogue between the two militaries.

Trump held his line and wants as few new requirements as possible. Both sides said they would work together on governing the technology, without saying how.

Taiwan: Xi wants a different word

Washington has said for decades that it does not support independence for Taiwan. Xi wants more. He asked Trump to oppose independence and to handle the question "with prudence".

The White House released no readout of that part of the conversation. In May, Trump postponed a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan.

Two more meetings are already in the calendar: APEC in Shenzhen on November 18 and 19, G20 in Miami on December 14 and 15, hosted at Trump's own golf resort. That puts the two of them face to face for the fourth time in 2026.

RATHER WATCH THAN READ?

Chinese robots started work this month in the French factory that builds the batteries for the electric Renault 5. Macron opened the plant himself last year. The machines come from a Beijing company almost nobody in Europe has heard of, and getting the first one through the door took eight months and a million yuan of European certificates.

Also in it:

• Hai Robotics, the world number one in warehouse robots, filed for a Hong Kong IPO with 3.5 billion yuan of losses behind it.

• A carrier in Hefei sells a mobile data plan whose customer is a robot, at 599 yuan a month.

• FANUC built a welding robot that reads the part drawing and writes its own programme.

Watch the episode

FROM THE TEAM

AgiBot delivered its 20,000th robot on Thursday, at the Chimelong resort in Zhuhai. More than 300 of them now work across the park. We were on site when founder Deng Taihua handed it to Chimelong chairman Su Zhigang.

We take small groups to the manufacturers that build these robots. You can see how one of our tours runs on our site.

OUR PARTNER

Some teams never seem to stop moving. They're on Attio, the agentic CRM.

It’s your always-on revenue engine: agents and workflows build pipeline, chase every buying signal, and move deals forward alongside your team.

Teams like Parallel, Turbopuffer, and Wordsmith build on Attio. Are you one of them?

Try Attio now

INFOGRAPHIC OF THE WEEK

Germany does the most cleaning with robots. 19% of adults own a robot vacuum or a robot lawn mower, more than in any of the other seven countries surveyed. France follows on 17%, India on 16%.

Japan comes in at 5%, South Korea at 3%. Both countries have built the world's industrial robots for decades, and hardly any of them stand in their own living rooms.

China and the United States are level on 14% each. Source: Statista Consumer Insights, 1,700 to 8,600 adults aged 18 to 64 surveyed per country, January to December 2025.

5 STORIES YOU MISSED LAST WEEK

🇨🇳 InnoCare gets up to $3.35 billion from Eli Lilly: The Beijing cancer drug developer signed a research partnership worth up to $3.35 billion with the US pharma group on Thursday. InnoCare will use its own platform to find compounds against up to five new targets in the body, and Lilly gets the global marketing rights. Up to $100 million flows upfront and for the first stages, the remaining $3.25 billion depends on development and sales targets. On top of that come single-digit royalties on annual sales. The share fell 10.6% in Shanghai and 7.9% in Hong Kong the same day, in line with the wider market. Early-stage research for Western pharma groups now regularly comes out of China.

🇯🇵 SoftBank borrows $11.1 billion for OpenAI: The Japanese group placed the largest high-yield bond ever issued by an Asian issuer on Wednesday. It sold $10 billion in dollar bonds and 1 billion euros in euro bonds, around 1.76 trillion yen in total. High-yield means the borrower counts as risky and pays a higher interest rate for it. The money funds the third and final tranche of the $30 billion SoftBank committed to OpenAI in February, due on October 1. That takes its total in OpenAI to $64.6 billion, on top of its stakes in the data centres around it.

🇹🇭 Thailand adopts an $80 billion semiconductor strategy: The policy board under Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Ekniti Nitithanprapas approved the country's first national chip strategy. By 2050 it targets around $80 billion in investment, 230,000 new jobs and $150 billion in annual industry revenue. The plan runs in three stages: expand advanced packaging by 2030, attract chip design and wafer fabs by 2040, and complete the domestic supply chain by 2050. Since 2023 the investment board has already received 879 applications worth $27.2 billion. Thailand is betting on three fields: photonics for data centres, power semiconductors for electric vehicles, and sensors.

🇨🇳 YMTC wins a sales ban against Micron in Munich: The Munich Regional Court I ruled that the US memory maker infringes two German utility models held by Chinese rival Yangtze Memory and barred sales of the products concerned in Germany. The case covers 3D NAND, the memory chips that hold data without power and sit in phones, data centres and cars. The dispute has been running since November 2023, and this is the first win on the merits for the Chinese side. Micron disagrees, has filed an appeal and is challenging the rights themselves. Chinese chipmakers are now litigating where their competitors sell.

🇸🇬 StarHub is in talks to buy M1: Singapore's second largest mobile operator and the conglomerate Keppel confirmed discussions over M1 on Wednesday, the number three in the market. Keppel took M1 private in 2019 and has been looking for a route to consolidation since. In May a sale to Simba collapsed, at the time worth 1.43 billion Singapore dollars, around 1.12 billion US dollars. A StarHub and M1 combination would be the first major merger among Singapore's mobile carriers, leaving only Singtel ahead of them. JPMorgan is advising StarHub, DBS is advising Keppel and M1. Both sides stress that nothing is decided.

ALSO LAST WEEK

🇨🇳 BYD opened its 2,000th highway flash charging station and hit its annual target three months early. The stations deliver up to 1,500 kW and take the second-generation Blade battery from 10% to 70% in five minutes. BYD now runs 11,586 stations across 341 cities, with 20,000 planned by the end of the year.

🇰🇷 LG Display has scrapped the sale of its automotive display plant in Nanjing. Buyer Top Run Total Solution would have paid 491.5 million yuan, around $68.9 million, but the two sides could not settle the final conditions. Closing had already been pushed from July 30 to September 30. Neither side pays a penalty.

🇨🇳 DJI and Insta360 ship 93% of all handheld cameras worldwide. In the second quarter 5.88 million units reached the market, 57% more than a year earlier, according to IDC, on revenue of around 15.7 billion yuan. DJI accounts for 73%, Insta360 for 20%. Two Chinese firms now set the terms in a market GoPro once created.