Trump-Xi summit bade farewell to ‘China plus one’ — SkimNews
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- Trump personally greeted Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews, a rare gesture for an American president, before hosting a state dinner with a cannon salute and bald eagle sculpture gift, attended by Apple CEO Tim Cook, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, AMD's Lisa Su, and Tesla's Elon Musk.
- The "China+1" strategy — pushed during Trump's first term to move multinationals toward alternate supply bases in Vietnam, India, and Mexico — has effectively vanished from Washington's vocabulary, with no senior administration officials or executives using the term anymore.
- US-China trade fell by approximately 30% in 2025 alone, yet China has built a complete supply chain across all 41 industrial categories and 666 sub-categories in the UN classification, becoming what McKinsey calls the "factory to the world's factories."
- Apple's first foldable iPhone Duo was developed, trial-produced, and assembled exclusively in China — not India or Vietnam — according to the company's vice-president for Asia procurement and operations.
- Tesla is now sourcing multiple Chinese suppliers for its Optimus humanoid robot after previously announcing plans to phase Chinese suppliers out of its American-built cars.
- EnerVenue, a California battery startup, abandoned plans for a US$264 million factory in Kentucky and began mass production in Changzhou, China, citing the country's skilled workforce and supply chain strength.
- Xi Jinping proposed that Trump's "Make America Great Again" and China's national rejuvenation can be "mutually reinforcing," explicitly rejecting the Thucydides Trap premise that a rising and an established power must inevitably clash.
Why it matters: For eight years, US-China policy assumed corporate America could economically decouple from Chinese supply chains — a premise that has collapsed with Apple producing the iPhone Duo exclusively in China and EnerVenue abandoning a $264 million Kentucky factory. The Trump-Xi summit's vocabulary shift formalizes a dependency Washington can no longer dismiss.
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