Eating Peanut Butter While Trump Pitches a Trillion to Beijing

It is 4:18 PM in a kitchen that gets exactly twelve minutes of direct sunlight per day, and I am eating peanut butter off a spoon because I have decided that lunch was a concept invented by people with better dental insurance than mine. The spoon is one of the good ones. The peanut butter is not. On my phone, somewhere between an ad for a mattress and a notification about a calendar event I do not remember accepting, I read that the President is in Beijing, meeting Xi Jinping, and hoping someone will pledge to give him a great deal of money.

The story, by Alan Rappeport, reports that Trump's people are floating the possibility of a major Chinese investment pledge, alongside the more conventional talk of farm products and planes and a sliver of access to China's consumer market. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that the United States and China are working on something called an investment board, which would tell China which sectors it is allowed to put money into without being shooed away by the Committee on Foreign Investment, which Bessent also runs. "Look, there are plenty of things that the Chinese could invest in in the U.S.," he said, in the tone of a man hosting a dinner party he has not fully prepared for.

I keep getting stuck on the numbers. Last year, according to the Rhodium Group, less than $3 billion of Chinese investment in the United States was announced. The lowest on record. In 2016 it was around $45 billion. Numbers, like spoons, get smaller depending on who is holding them. Trump, the article says, would like to announce a $1 trillion pledge, which is the kind of figure you say out loud the way you might tell a date that you "basically own" your apartment.

Meanwhile, the China scholar Michael Pillsbury describes the difficulty of assembling a "white list" of safe sectors, since "the red lines have moved back and forth as the nature of technology has changed." I find this sentence unbearably tender. It is the sentence of a man trying to childproof a house in which the child keeps aging. Semiconductors, AI, biotech, aerospace, critical minerals. Rep. John Moolenaar wants to ban China from buying farmland. American steel groups have written a letter, in the voice steel groups use, begging the administration not to let Chinese cars in. More than half of the Chinese clean-energy investments that surged after 2022 have, per Rhodium, been canceled, paused, or delayed. Delayed is my favorite. Delayed is what I tell myself about almost everything.

What I feel, sitting here with my spoon, is not outrage. It is the small embarrassed recognition that countries, like people, sometimes want very badly to be invested in by someone they do not entirely trust, and call it a deal, and call it dinner, and call it fine.

The peanut butter, at least, is honest about what it is.

Source: The Seattle Times — Business (image and reporting)