The Pinglu Canal gives landlocked southwestern China faster, cheaper access to the sea and offers maritime ASEAN a new route to European markets through China’s freight rail network. Its benefits can flow both ways, from Vietnamese exporters reaching inland China to new momentum for the Beibu Gulf region, while also showcasing China’s engineering capacity.

The China-EU trade consensus has meaning beyond a list of commodities, tariffs and various restrictions. Two of the world’s largest trading powers have chosen to engage inside the rules instead of maneuvering outside them. It’s an example that quietly draws a bottom line for global trade.

The renminbi is back at the center of debates about global macroeconomic imbalances. With China’s merchandise trade surplus widening to $1.2 trillion in 2025, and with its manufacturing sector becoming increasingly dominant, the near-consensus among financial and economic commentators is that the renminbi is significantly undervalued. The implication is that China should let its currency appreciate sharply, thereby shrinking its surplus, easing competitive pressure on manufacturers elsewhere, and helping rebalance the global economy.

For most of the past four decades, China’s direction of travel was clear: everything was moving forward. The country’s per capita GDP was barely $300 at the start of the 1990s. But its cities would soon fill with skyscrapers, highways, and subways. Families that once worried about having enough food would buy apartments, cars, and smartphones. Children would go to universities their parents could scarcely have imagined attending. In the space of a generation, China joined the World Trade Organization, hosted the Olympics, built the world’s largest high-speed rail network, and became a central engine of the global economy.

China and the Asia-Pacific are projected to out-earn the U.S. within ten years, but that doesn’t mean America is going out of business. Will financial power follow the money?

Economic warfare in Europe has stranded Russia in the global market, but has yet to produce a reduction in its ambitions. Yet the EU is seeking to expand penalties with no clear outcome in hand.

The U.S.-China AI rivalry is being reshaped by the rapid advance of frontier models and a widening divide between U.S.-led closed systems and China’s increasingly competitive open-weight ecosystem. As AI systems become more autonomous and capable, the race for technological leadership is creating risks that traditional diplomacy and governance mechanisms may be increasingly ill-equipped to manage.

Interdependence has shifted dramatically toward greater global diversity in supply chains. Successful dialogue and cooperation now will help shape a new, complementary, win-win bilateral trade relationship for the next decade.

The future of global trade is unlikely to feature a reformed and revitalized WTO. Instead, we face a fragmented landscape defined by geopolitical blocs and competing regulatory spheres.

The three-pillar structure—China, the United States and Europe—will remain in place, but the forces sustaining it will shift from shared growth and open cooperation toward mutual constraint and a shared aversion to systemic risks.