Beyond the Truce: The Xi-Trump Agreement in Busan Legitimizes Total Bipolarism and Accelerates the Silicon War

The meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and American President Donald Trump, which took place in Busan on October 30, 2025, on the sidelines of the APEC summit, marked a turning point in Sino-American relations. The immediate designation of the event by Trump as a "G2" meeting had a disruptive geopolitical impact, as it validated Beijing's strategic parity, accepting the idea of a global order jointly managed by the two superpowers.

The central subject of discussion was the pursuit of a more stable framework for managing the trade conflict, culminating in specific agreements that offer temporary relief: the United States agreed to the cancellation of the 10% tariffs imposed on Chinese products related to fentanyl, and China suspended export restrictions on rare earth elements (REE). These reciprocal concessions establish a framework "more stable and institutionalized" for managing the competition.

On October 31, 2025, Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun responded to questions about the "G2" by maintaining a rhetorical line of autonomy. While rejecting the label and invoking "authentic multilateralism" and an "equitable and orderly multipolar world", he simultaneously affirmed that China and the United States, as "major powers," must jointly assume the "responsibility" of overcoming global challenges.

The Busan truce, therefore, is not a sign of détente, but the result of extreme Realpolitik. Its true significance is measured in the field of technological supremacy, the crucial issue left on the table, where competition between the two superpowers is intensifying for global control.

Xi Jinping

The Technological Epicenter: Digital War and the Strategic Future

The true meaning of the G2 should be interpreted in light of the ongoing technological war, the area where China explicitly aims for global dominance.

Chips, Taiwan, and the Silicon Crisis

The battle for advanced semiconductors is the most evident expression of the competition for supremacy. U.S. sanctions, aimed at strangling Beijing's access to the most sophisticated chips, revealed the crucial dependence of the United States on Taiwan.

The island acts as a genuine "silicon shield": its microelectronics industry, particularly TSMC, is vital for maintaining the American military and technological advantage in key sectors like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced defense. The United States must balance military deterrence with the goal of preserving Taiwan’s productive capacity, as its loss would result in the end of U.S. technological supremacy.

The G2 could be read as a tactical non-belligerence agreement over the Taiwan Strait, allowing Washington to buy time to accelerate the construction of resilient domestic supply chains.

The 15th Five-Year Plan and the Goal of Digital Dominance

China's response to sanctions has not been capitulation, but a total mobilization of state resources, accelerating its path toward self-sufficiency and quality innovation. The 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030), approved in draft form in October, constitutes the blueprint for this strategy. The primary goal is global digital and technological dominance, through a strategy of technological sovereignty in key sectors:

• Semiconductors: Total elimination of the foreign dependence "bottleneck" with massive investment in the research and development of advanced design and manufacturing processes.

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Quantum Computing: Consolidating global leadership by 2030, in line with the ambition to dominate the "fourth industrial revolution."

• Digital Platforms and Data: The critical issue of TikTok's operations in the United States shows that global digital platforms are geoeconomic weapons. The expansion of platforms like TikTok (ByteDance) is an integral part of China’s geoeconomic digital power, aligned with the civil-military fusion strategy.

• Geoeconomic Digital Power: The plan aims for capillary control of global infrastructure (5G, submarine cables, cloud) to transform information flows into a decisive strategic resource, projecting its power across borders.

This strategy of total dominance is summarized in a phrase resonating within Beijing circles: "The next five years is war". This is not a reference to a conventional armed conflict, but the announcement of total, no-holds-barred competition on every front (economic, technological, cognitive, and infiltration) to assert supremacy and Beijing's will to power.

The Foundations of Power: Predatory Geoeconomics and Asymmetric Levers

Xi Jinping's negotiating strength at the Busan summit is founded on the basis of a predatory strategy that has systematically transformed interdependence into a weapon of economic coercion.

Economic "Hard Power" and Systemic Violations

China built its power through years of cyber theft of intellectual property, and a historical systematic non-compliance with commitments made, particularly those related to WTO entry. This exploitation of the liberal order has created a power asymmetry that today translates into decisive geoeconomic levers:

• Critical Raw Materials: The undisputed dominance of China over rare earth elements (REE) and strategic minerals places the American hi-tech industry in objective vulnerability.

• Essential Supplies: Control over the supply chain of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) and generic drugs and the ability to manipulate agricultural markets (like soy) make the cost of a total trade war politically unsustainable for Washington.

The "Fifth Column" and Political Conditioning

The achievement of the truce was also influenced by internal pressures exerted by American multinationals with interests in China. These companies act as a "fifth column" of lobbyists, whose profits depend on the stability of the Xi regime. The lobbying efforts to mitigate sanctions limit the federal government's freedom of action, transforming the obsessive pursuit of profit into a structural vulnerability that Beijing exploits to condition American foreign policy.

The Ideological Contradiction: Facade Multilateralism and Infiltration

The rhetoric of Guo Jiakun must be analyzed in light of the profound contradictoriness of Chinese policy, which uses the language of cooperation to mask a design of total hegemony.

Strategic Use of International Organizations

The apparent Chinese multilateralism is configured as a cynical tool to shape international organizations from within for its own use and consumption. The goal is not the respect for rules, but the assertion of a framework in which totalitarianism can exert its hegemony, imposing a world view where "sovereign rights" supersede and suppress individual liberties.

Cognitive Warfare and Elite Co-optation

In parallel, China conducts a total cognitive war through sophisticated constant propaganda, aimed at undermining trust in democratic values and consolidating the legitimacy of its model. This strategy has been successfully implemented through the co-optation of political elites and capillary penetration: China has managed to "penetrate and become rooted in the very core of our political, economic, and cultural apparatuses". The recognition of a G2, in this context, sanctions the tacit acceptance of this reality as the basis for the new global balance.

Conclusions: Inevitable Bipolarism and the Price of the Truce

The Xi-Trump summit in Busan (October 30, 2025) crystallizes the reality of a Sino-American bipolarism, where the US acknowledgment of Beijing's strategic parity de facto legitimizes its totalitarian model. The issue of TikTok operations in the United States was an integral part of the potential commercial truce negotiated in Busan.

The commercial truce represents temporary economic relief, but its geopolitical cost is significant: a substantial strategic subordination of the West and the tacit global legitimization of the Chinese totalitarian model. The truce is not peace, but a tactical pause masking the ongoing war for technological and digital hegemony, in which China, leveraging its geoeconomic levers (rare earth elements, APIs) and the next 15th Five-Year Plan, prepares for global dominance.

The technological war is already underway, and the next five years will be decisive in establishing who will dictate the norms of the 21st century. Should China and the US ultimately divide the rules of the game, all other global actors would be forced to align in a new order, where cynical Realpolitik and Beijing's will to power prevail over rules-based multilateralism.