The Xi-Trump Summit with Dr. Henry Wang and Jacob Cooke

In a special episode of The Negotiation, WPIC CEO Jacob Cooke sits down with Dr. Henry Wang, founder and president of the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), one of China's leading policy think tanks. The conversation takes place fresh off the Trump-Xi summit — a historic meeting that put AI governance, trade stability, and the future of the US-China relationship back at the centre of global attention.

Dr. Wang is a former Counselor to China's State Council, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and one of the most widely cited Chinese foreign policy voices in international media. In this episode, he gives his immediate read on the summit's outcomes, what they mean for the bilateral relationship, and where the US and China go from here.

The conversation then turns to AI — the most consequential item on the bilateral agenda. Dr. Wang explains his call for a global no-first-use policy covering AI-enabled autonomous weapons, walks through his argument that the US AI capex boom carries risks that cooperation with China could help mitigate, and assesses what an effective US-China AI governance framework would actually look like in practice. He also breaks down China's AI advantages — not in frontier models, but in application scale, deployment infrastructure, and commercial reach — and what that means for international businesses operating in the region.

 

Discussion Points

·       Dr. Wang's immediate reaction to the Trump-Xi summit outcomes and what they signal about the trajectory of the US-China relationship

·       Why this summit was a significant anchor for bilateral stability — and what was at stake if it had gone badly

·       The areas of US-China cooperation beyond tariffs and technology: people-to-people exchanges, global security challenges, and why they keep getting crowded out

·       Assessment of progress on the AI file at the summit — where things moved forward and where they fell short

·       The case for a global no-first-use policy on AI-enabled autonomous weapons, modelled on nuclear precedent

·       Why Dr. Wang compares the US AI capex boom to an arms race — and the economic risks that cooperation with China could help avoid

·       What an effective US-China AI governance framework looks like in practice, and what it would take to get there

·       China's AI advantages in application, deployment, and commercial scale — and what that means for international businesses

·       Whether the summit leaves Dr. Wang more or less optimistic about the bilateral relationship over the next few years

·       The work CCG is doing on US-China relations and global governance, and where listeners can follow Dr. Wang's thinking

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