Xi Jinping Can't Even Choose His Successor? Xi Mingze Spotted at the White House? Wen Jiabao's Faction Pushes to 'Institutionalize' China-US Trade! The Knife Handle Is Still There, but the Money Bag Is No Longer Xi's Alone to Decide! [Jiang Feng's View 20260929 Episode 500]
This episode analyzes the speculation about a successor sparked by the mysterious woman in a black dress at the White House state dinner, pointing out that the current power dynamics in Beijing no longer allow the top leader to unilaterally arrange a successor. At the same time, by interpreting the China-U.S. economic and trade implementation document released by the Ministry of Commerce on September 28, restrictions on the exit of key technical talents, the Peaceful China meeting, the Eastern Theater Command generals' involvement in Taiwan Strait communications, and the costs of playing the rare earths card, it explores the reality of Beijing's multi-front tug-of-war and quietly dispersing power in areas such as economy, trade, security, and the Taiwan Strait.
Video Link:
Full Text:
Hello friends, welcome to Jiang Feng Horizon. The mysterious woman in a black dress sitting next to the leader's wife at the White House state dinner has been the subject of much guesswork across overseas websites these past few days. People are asking whether she is truly the princess from the family at the very top, and some even draw parallels to North Korea's Kim Jong Un frequently appearing with his daughter, wondering if the figure in Zhongnanhai has also had second thoughts and wants to lay the groundwork early for a family succession. Today, Jiang Feng wants to state clearly right off the bat: even if that woman truly is the princess, the leader is probably unable to walk down that path of Kim Jong Un today. To reserve the position for the next generation, one must first hold the power to decide that next generation. The negotiation timeline published by the Ministry of Commerce today has laid bare all the hidden cards: from September 20 to 23, many truly critical economic and trade terms had already been more or less negotiated before the leader stepped foot into the White House. A few days ago, we said that the leader took face while Trump took substance; today's officially released timeline serves as a receipt confirming that assessment. But what is truly interesting is what happened after he returned to Beijing. On that very same day, different systems in Beijing rolled out policies pointing in completely opposite directions: the security system continues to shut the door tightly, while the financial and economic systems are desperately pushing the door open toward the United States. Who is closing the door, and who is opening it? This is precisely what we are going to look at today.
On September 28, the series of documents released by the Ministry of Commerce were far from standard diplomatic pleasantries. The agricultural working group under the U.S.-China Trade Council, the U.S.-China Investment Council, financial services market access, the increase in direct U.S.-China passenger flights, plus the AI dialogue led by He Lifeng and U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent—all included specific, black-and-white arrangements, including the date for the next round of meetings at the end of November and the extension of the Kuala Lumpur tariff truce until January 10 next year. This time, the White House even wrote into the documents how this machine should operate: He Lifeng sits in command on the Chinese side, while Treasury Secretary Bessent and Trade Representative Greer lead on the U.S. side. Their deputies are to meet at least quarterly, and working-level exchanges are to be normalized. The $30 billion versus $30 billion commodity lists are not something that can be changed on a whim; there is a fixed procedure for how they are adjusted and implemented. Seeing this, the situation feels different. A state banquet can end, and Trump and the leader can go home after shaking hands, but this machine does not stop. The top level can decide whether to turn it on, but once the start button is pressed, who negotiates, when they negotiate, how the lists are adjusted, and what is implemented becomes a matter of the bureaucratic system meeting deadlines. This is no longer the old way of playing, where a single word from the leader could lead to tariff hikes or table-flipping overnight, leaving the whole world guessing. The Ministry of Commerce filled in the negotiation schedule from September 20 to 23, which also validated our previous analysis that the White House had the substance while the lists held the details. Much of the substantive content had already been settled by the teams below before the top-level meeting officially took place. But what is most worth pondering today is not who stole the spotlight on the red carpet, but the true direction behind these executive documents. For the past few years, the propaganda machine has talked daily about security, self-reliance, and daring to struggle, but the keywords that have actually entered the execution tables this time are tax cuts, market access, investment cooperation, financial opening, AI communication, and increased flights. This leads to a realistic question: what exactly has Beijing conceded, and what things that were once tightly restricted are now quietly being adjusted? Diplomatic rhetoric can be embellished, but commodity lists are hard to disguise. Next, we will open this tax cut table to see what Trump has taken away and what Beijing is rushing to trade for in return.
Politicians lie and official news agencies embellish, but customs tariff codes and import-export commodity lists never lie. In the $30 billion versus $30 billion lists announced by both sides, placing the specific items listed by both parties on the table reveals the underlying cards with stark contrast. First, look at the list of tax cuts the U.S. is giving China: a total of 77 major categories. What are they? Mostly mature household consumer goods and daily manufactured products—the very export categories where China most needs to secure U.S. orders. Now look back at the list of tax cuts China is giving the U.S.: a staggering 1,619 tariff lines covering a dazzling array of categories. Beef, mutton, chicken, animal offal, tuna, cod, lobster, crab, cream, cheese, butter, honey, wheat, barley, corn, rice, sorghum, timber, logs, tobacco, cosmetics, various types of coal and coal products, and even highly eye-catching high-precision medical equipment, ultrasonic diagnostic instruments, MRI devices, and various specialized dental equipment. By comparing these two lists, you can taste the precise political calculations behind this grand deal.
Look at Trump's side first. Trump is a shrewd businessman and politician; he knows exactly where his power base lies. What he has brought back for American workers and farmers are solid, tangible orders. The agricultural states in the U.S. Midwest are the Republican Party's ironclad base; the large-scale export of wheat, corn, sorghum, and meat to China delivers benefits directly into the hands of farmers. Coal miners in the Appalachian Mountains and Wyoming are worried about the future of traditional energy; Beijing's promise to import at least 10 million tons of U.S. coal annually in 2027 and 2028 effectively locks in two years of employment and cash flow for the U.S. coal industry. Meanwhile, U.S. high-end medical equipment manufacturers, which hold global monopoly advantages, have been handed the key to open the massive public hospital procurement market in China. At the same time, many of the areas where Trump has given the green light to Chinese goods are daily consumer items that the U.S. relies heavily on imports for and that directly affect the prices of ordinary households. With the traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping seasons approaching at the end of the year, exempting toys, small appliances, and holiday decorations from high tariffs can suppress domestic commodity inflation in the U.S. as quickly as possible, allowing ordinary voters to feel the drop in prices when checking out at the supermarket. By pleasing farmers, miners, and medical giants while soothing the wallets of the grassroots consumers, and accumulating enough chips for the upcoming midterm elections, this move to win on both fronts is nothing short of ruthless.
As for Beijing, is it really acting as a unilateral sucker? It is not that simple. The fundamental dead end China faces now is the comprehensive shrinkage of domestic demand triggered by the real estate collapse, and the bottleneck where massive manufacturing capacity cannot be digested by the domestic market. Thousands of private foreign trade enterprises in Guangdong and Zhejiang that produce toys, small appliances, plastic products, and textiles have been hanging by a thread during the tax-hike frenzy of the past few years. These industries have low technical barriers but provide employment for tens of millions of ordinary industrial workers and migrant workers. If these factories were to close on a large scale, it would trigger chain-reaction social unrest. Therefore, Beijing is striving to get the U.S. to lift tariffs on these non-sensitive goods; even if the profit gained is extremely meager, it is to buy a breath of life for the coastal private economy and prevent the overall employment situation from collapsing completely. This is a realist exchange where both sides act according to their most critical current pain points.
However, buried deep within this list of seemingly mutual needs are three highly unusual political details that are thought-provoking. The first detail is the mysterious soybean. Friends familiar with the history of the U.S.-China trade war know that soybeans have always been Beijing's most important card against U.S. agricultural states. Yet, in this $30 billion tax-cut framework, soybeans were excluded. At the same time, Beijing separately promised outside the framework to purchase 25 million tons of soybeans from the U.S. annually until 2028. Why go to such lengths to remove soybeans from this institutionalized tax-cut list and place them on a separate track? This precisely reflects the cunning and scheming of Beijing's financial technocrats. Soybeans are the lifeline of core agricultural states like Iowa and are the most immediate lever to check the Trump administration. If soybeans were directly stuffed into the normalized tax-exemption list, this card would be effectively discarded in one go. By pulling them out separately and assessing them against annual procurement targets, Beijing can adjust the pace of procurement at any political juncture based on the White House's attitude. If you are softer toward me, I will place more orders; if you push too hard on technology or geopolitics, the procurement fleet can technically slow down its port calls. While making huge concessions, Beijing still tightly grips this bean that can be used for blackmail at any time.
The second detail is the absurd rhetoric regarding coal. In the official interpretation released by the head of the Department of American and Oceanian Affairs of the Ministry of Commerce, there appeared such a laughable statement: China's import of U.S. coal will bring stable economic income and employment to the U.S. coal industry. If this were said by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, it would be perfectly normal, but printed in black and white on an official press release from the CCP Ministry of Commerce, it exudes a thick sense of absurdity. Since when did officials from a major central ministry start worrying about the household income and employment rates of American coal miners in West Virginia who vote for the Republican Party? Behind this comical officialese, it is actually a gesture of extreme sycophancy to claim credit before Washington: look, we are using real money to help you secure the Rust Belt votes and jobs you care about most.
The third detail, and the most face-slapping signal, is the tax-cut access for MRI machines, ultrasound equipment, and high-end dental instruments. Over the past seven or eight years, the person at the top has insisted at every meeting on domestic substitution, demanding that the healthcare system increase the proportion of domestic medical equipment procurement, and even setting up hidden barriers in bidding documents in various provinces to exclude imported equipment, determined to turn so-called "choke-point" high-end medical devices into benchmarks for independent research and development. The state media propaganda machine has boasted countless times that domestic MRI technology has broken Western monopolies. Yet now that the list is published, the items at the forefront of the tax cuts are precisely U.S.-made MRI and ultrasound diagnostic machines. This undoubtedly shows that when the extremely closed slogan of self-reliance hits the cruel wall of reality, and when Beijing discovers that top domestic medical institutions cannot maintain operations relying solely on domestic equipment of uneven quality, while simultaneously needing to curry favor with U.S. high-tech manufacturing, that grand blueprint of domestic substitution boasted about by the leader for years can only be quietly shoved into the bottom of a drawer. Toys, coal, soybeans, MRI machines—these unrelated commodities, pieced together on a tax-cut list, silently tell the same story: the financial team responsible for maintaining the national economy is sparing no cost to dismantle the barriers built over the past few years, attempting to install a sturdy bolt on that crumbling door between China and the U.S.
However, on the exact same day the ink on this open list was barely dry, another apparatus of violence in Beijing was roaring in the exact opposite direction. On September 28, Bloomberg obtained a multi-verified piece of news showing that Beijing's exit restrictions on critical technology talent were quietly expanding. Originally, in the first half of this year, AI experts and core chip R&D personnel from private tech giants like Alibaba and DeepSeek had already been included on the exit control list. By late September, these restrictions even extended to their immediate family members—spouses and minor children of certain key personnel had to obtain special approval from Beijing even for private overseas travel or family visits. Putting these two pieces of news together makes it quite interesting: while He Lifeng was busy talking to the Americans about AI communication channels, Beijing was simultaneously terrified of core technology and top talent running abroad, even starting to monitor the overseas travel of some family members. The financial sector is afraid of disconnecting from the external market, while the security sector is afraid of the outflow of talent and technology; the two sides are fundamentally worried about entirely different things.
And that was just the daytime drama. By 6:12 PM that same evening, Xinhua News Agency released a weighty communique stating that the top leader had recently given important instructions on building a so-called higher-level peaceful China. The core of the instructions was very familiar, continuing to emphasize adherence to the overall national security outlook, upholding the comprehensive leadership of the Party, and demanding improvements in public safety governance to prevent and resolve various risks. At the subsequent Peaceful China construction work meeting, the lineup on stage also spoke volumes: CCP Political and Legal Affairs Commission Secretary Chen Wenqing attended and delivered a speech, stating that the supreme instructions chart the course for all work. Sitting beside him delivering the concluding remarks was Central Secretariat Secretary and Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong, while Supreme People's Court President Zhang Jun and Supreme People's Procuratorate Procurator-General Ying Yong were also present in the audience. This meeting of the political-legal and public security systems at least illustrates one fact: judging from public personnel arrangements and policy signals, the political and legal security front remains the area most stably controlled by the big boss right now. Chen Yixin is a direct former subordinate from the Zhejiang period with the deepest political ties; Chen Wenqing received continuous promotions after the 18th National Congress, stepping directly from the Ministry of State Security into the Politburo to head the Political and Legal Affairs Commission; coupled with Wang Xiaohong, who has long controlled the public security system, this security team continues the governance philosophy of the past decade or more, prioritizing security above all and control first. Therefore, whether it is tightening exit restrictions for the families of AI engineers or strengthening social-level public order control, the security apparatus is still maintaining its operations step by step.
Yet this precisely leads to an even more intriguing question: since the knife of security is still held by their own people, why has the policy wind direction turned so rapidly at the money-bag end? It should be noted that He Lifeng, the nominal overall coordinator on the economic and trade line, is also a figure deeply trusted by the top leader for many years, with clear political resume labels stretching all the way from Fujian to Beijing. However, looking through these rounds of China-US negotiations, someone else who has increasingly stepped onto the negotiation frontline to speak externally and grind out terms one by one with the US technical team is another figure of growing importance: International Trade Representative Li Chenggang. Li Chenggang is worth a closer look; he is a typical technocrat from the commerce system, having long worked on treaties, laws, the WTO, and foreign economic and trade negotiations. His public resume shows no obvious background as an old subordinate of the big boss from Fujian or Zhejiang. Now, his official title is already International Trade Representative at the ministerial level, and his presence has grown increasingly strong in recent rounds of China-US economic and trade contacts. This brings up a first possibility: while He Lifeng still sits in the position of overall coordinator, the actual responsibility of negotiating terms one by one, setting technical boundaries, and turning negotiation outcomes into implementation documents has increasingly fallen into the hands of professional economic and trade teams like Li Chenggang's. Therefore, there is currently a saying that he has completely sidelined He Lifeng. Let us not forget that the procedure just announced by the White House has written in that deputies will meet at least quarterly, which means that the professional negotiation team will no longer just be temporarily called in to sit alongside leaders during state visits, but will operate long-term on a fixed track. Whoever sits at the front line of this track will naturally gain an extra slice of practical operational space.
Even if that layer didn't exist, there is a second, more realistic reason. Even if He Lifeng still holds the reins of the overall economy, it is impossible for him to act solely on political loyalty. Sitting in that position, what he sees every day are local government finances, export orders, the flow of private and foreign investment, and manufacturing capacity—things that do not recognize factions, only numbers. If the economic and trade sectors continue to drive up the costs of friction with the United States, coastal factory orders, external markets, and capital expectations will all pay the price. Therefore, when reaching the negotiating table, even the top leader's most trusted financial aide must crunch these numbers. Hence, what is now worth examining is no longer simply asking whether He Lifeng is still the top leader's man; the truly interesting things are twofold. First, whether the logic used by the people directly operating beneath He Lifeng has already changed. Second, even if He Lifeng himself remains in power, whether the scope of policy options available in his hands is being squeezed narrower by reality. Just because the person hasn't changed doesn't mean the way power is exercised hasn't changed. He Lifeng is still He Lifeng, but what he ultimately agrees to or rejects on Beijing's behalf—that is true power. The top leader's man still sitting in that chair does not mean that chair today only obeys the single command of the top leader. In other words, the financial sector may currently have two forces operating simultaneously: on one end, the actual operating power of professional negotiating bureaucrats like Li Chenggang is rising; on the other end, China's economy itself is forcing top loyalists like He Lifeng to move in a pragmatic direction. These two lines ultimately converge on the same result: the economic and trade sector is starting to place more value on stabilizing the market, stabilizing exports, and stabilizing China-U.S. relations, rather than continuing to escalate the rhetoric of struggle. Therefore, once we understand these episodes of September 28, we can see that evaluating the current situation in Zhongnanhai can no longer be generalized simply by saying he has power or he has completely lost power. The security sector is still tightening inward, while the economic and trade sector is opening outward. The top leader cannot control everything, but clearly no longer calls all the shots alone; Beijing likely has more than one steering wheel now.
With the direction of the purse strings changed, what about that most sensitive gun—the movements recently appearing across the Taiwan Strait direction make for even more compelling viewing. In the external narratives toward the United States over the past few years, the situation in the Taiwan Strait has historically been the most explosive, with ships and aircraft from the Eastern Theater Command frequently operating around the strait, signaling a tit-for-tat stance without yielding an inch. Yet just as the outside world closely watched whether the storms in the Taiwan Strait would expand further, a very interesting safety catch appeared in frontline practical operations. Let's pull the timeline back to a month ago, on August 31, 2026, when General Yang Zhibin, Commander of the People's Liberation Army Eastern Theater Command, met in Canada with Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. The Eastern Theater Command commanded by Yang Zhibin is directly responsible for military affairs on the frontline of the Taiwan Strait, while the Indo-Pacific Command headed by Paparo is the primary U.S. military combat force in the Western Pacific. These two commanders sitting together at the absolute frontline of potential conflict prompted the U.S. side to subsequently release news mentioning that both parties focused discussions on maintaining high-level communications, reducing strategic miscalculations, and maintaining professionalism and safety during sea and air encounters between the two militaries. Immediately following this Washington meeting, an additional point was added to the officially announced consensus: the Chinese and U.S. militaries will sign a memorandum of understanding as soon as possible regarding the enhancement of crisis communication and prevention. What makes this matter worth pondering is not a single handshake, but how it pushes past temporary, intermittent high-level contacts toward institutionalized and fixed crisis communication. The outside world knows that the top military leadership has undergone continuous personnel purging over the past two years, with many figures once seen as the core of southeastern military and political affairs losing their positions. At this juncture, the question truly worth asking is: who authorized Yang Zhibin to negotiate, and who pushed crisis management with the U.S. military on the frontline of the Taiwan Strait all the way up to the theater commander level? With the theater commander directly facing the Taiwan Strait now appearing in an open role for U.S.-China military crisis communication, we cannot deduce from this memorandum that the so-called intention to attack Taiwan has been completely abandoned; military threats will still exist as bargaining chips. But if the highest leadership truly wanted to retain unfettered space for military adventuring at any time, why would the commander directly confronting the Taiwan Strait step forward to establish a normalized anti-miscalculation channel with the U.S. military? This indicates that at the concrete operational level, someone is putting a safety catch on the gun of the Taiwan Strait. By establishing frontline engagement rules, the probability of accidental misfire in the Taiwan Strait gains an extra layer of administrative constraint—at least providing a direct communication mechanism to step on the brakes before any actual misfire occurs.
Beyond the fact that the gun of the Taiwan Strait has begun to be fitted with a safety, another trump card often used in the past to challenge the West—critical minerals and rare earths—has also recently been subject to new calculations. The Wall Street Journal published a long-form investigation on September 27, outlining the U.S. layout for critical mineral supply chains since the start of Trump's second term. Since China tightened export controls on certain heavy rare earths in April 2025, the White House National Security Council has coordinated multiple departments to take action. The Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the State Department, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of the Interior, along with the Export-Import Bank of the United States and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, have invested approximately $7.6 billion in non-equity investments into domestic and allied rare earth and magnet projects over the past 18 months—a figure several times higher than the previous four years. Diplomatically, the U.S. has also cast a net, promoting critical mineral cooperation agreements with over 20 countries across multiple continents. They have pledged at least $1 billion to mining and processing projects in Australia, reached a mineral resources and security cooperation agreement with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, supported companies in acquiring rare earth mines in Goiás, Brazil, invested in lithium refining in Argentina, and even reached deep into Central Asia and Uzbekistan to establish mineral cooperation. Objectively speaking, the U.S. is still far from completely breaking its dependence on China, and China's advantages in rare earth mining, refining, and magnet manufacturing remain quite solid. However, the change in the situation lies in the fact that the U.S. is using state funds and a global network of allies to build a backup supply chain step by step. This poses a very realistic arithmetic problem for Beijing: China's rare earth card is still very strong today, but the problem is that every time it is played, the U.S. spends more money to find ways to make it less effective the next time. If every control measure forces the West to accelerate the search for alternatives, then in a few years, the deterrent power of this card will be difficult to maintain at today's level. Therefore, for policymakers in Beijing, the most cost-effective strategy may not be to play the card until it is useless today, but to use it while it is still valuable to trade for tariffs, market access, and a period of U.S.-China detente. This is also why both sides are willing to extend the suspension period for tariffs and non-tariff measures in Kuala Lumpur until January 2027. With the Taiwan Strait side starting to discuss preventing miscalculations and the rare earth side starting to calculate usage costs, people have begun to do the math on the two cards that were once best suited for a head-on collision with the U.S.
So the question returns: if even these hardest cards are being calculated for cost, even if that woman in black at the White House is truly one of the leader's people, can her father still arrange the next shift for her? In recent days, the internet has been filled with various speculations, comparing snapshots from every angle to determine whether she is indeed the princess. In fact, in serious political analysis, we don't need to verify her identity at all today. Taking a step back, even if that woman were 100% the leader's biological daughter, the real question worth asking is no longer whether she is appearing on the international diplomatic stage for the first time, but how much power her father has left in his hands today to arrange positions for the next generation. Many people think of Kim Jong Un. Kim Jong Un dares to bring his daughter onto the political stage time and again because the entire power chain in Pyongyang still revolves around the Kim family. But Beijing today is not in this situation; different systems and different factions are all calculating their own accounts, and even the leader's own policy rhythm may not be something he can decide alone. Since even the boundaries of the father's own power are changing, whether the daughter can succeed him is no longer a question of whether the leader wants it, but whether this power structure will still allow it. Alright, that's all for today.
Friends who like Jiang Feng Vision,
Don't forget to follow, like, and share.
See you in the next episode.
Pretang has launched a limited-time special offer.