U.S.-China bilateral relations have, surprisingly, been an anchor of calm amidst a sea of geopolitical uncertainty in the opening innings of 2026.
And increasingly, it looks like the seemingly fragile truce between the two countries will prove more resilient that it initially seemed – back when US President Trump and Xi Jinping agreed to a trade war détente in November.
To discuss the state of play – and where things might be going – Trivium China pod host Andrew Polk is joined this week by Joe Mazur (Head of Geopolitical Research) and Even Pay (Head of Ag and Trade Policy Research).
The trio discuss:
The notable shift in tone and approach from the Trump administration toward China
The latest Xi-Trump call, which took place this week
The upcoming visit to China by Donald Trump, which is set for April
Whether America’s more aggressive policy in the Western Hemisphere is hurting or helping China’s interests in the region
Then Andrew and Even go deep on the most important domestic policy development of the week, the release of the 2026 No. 1 Document, which outlines ag policy priorities for the year.
They touch on:
Why ag and rural policies are so important to Party leaders
The shift toward boosting efficiency and productivity in the ag sector – as part of Xi’s wider promotion of New Quality Productive Forces
Recent adjustments to ag and rural policy funding arrangements, and what they might mean for China’s non-urban areas
Transcript:
Andrew Polk: Hi, everybody, and welcome to the latest Trivium China Podcast, a proud member of the Sinica Podcast Network. I’m your host, Trivium Co-Founder, Andrew Polk. And today, I am joined by two guests who’ve been on the pod before but are a sort of regular guest. So, it’s great to have them back. And that is our Head of Geopolitics Research, Joe Mazur, and our Head of… well, we call her our Head of Ag. She’s a Director at Trivium. She does our agricultural research, but she’s also sort of a Jack of all trades. She literally does our trade analysis and works on minerals and a bunch of other stuff, and that’s Even Pay. So, Even, welcome back to the pod. Good to have you on.
Even Pay: Yeah, it’s great to be here.
Andrew: And, Joe, great to have you on as well, man. Good to see you back.
Joe Mazur: Good to see you as well, Andrew.
Andrew: So, with Joe and Even, today we are going to get into some geopolitics. We haven’t really touched in on the geopolitical story since we started the pod back up in 2026, and I thought Joe would be perfect person to have on to talk about that. Even also covers some elements of geopolitics, like I said, trade and some other things. So, we’ll have her weigh in on some of that. We will talk specifically about sort of the surprising stability in U.S.-China relations in a year that is so far otherwise been quite volatile on the geopolitics front. I talk a lot to clients.
I’m like, “Everyone needs to be taking advantage of this period of stability.” And people are like, “Period stability? What are you talking about? Iran, Venezuela, Greenland.” Anyway, the bright spot, to some extent, has been U.S.-China. So, we’ll get into that. There was a call between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump just within the past, I think, 24, 36 hours. So, we’ll talk about that. And we will then sort of pivot to domestic policy in China, which is where we’ll really lean on Even to talk about the document, number one that came out just a few days ago, which is always on ag policy. And we’ll walk through why that document’s important. There are some linkages to trade, you know, with the U.S. and others.
But more importantly, it really kind of sets a mark in the ground every year on priorities for this very important sector in the Party’s eyes. But before we get into any of that, of course, we have to start with the customary vibe check. Even, again, I’ll start with you. How’s your vibe?
Even: Yeah, the vibe is good. I think, like many people around the world, I’m really enthusiastic about the upcoming Year of the Horse. There’s been this meme that’s sort of somehow made it beyond China circles and out into global social media about how the snake year is about shedding old things. But then the Horse Year is about momentum, and I feel like that’s really in the zeitgeist. And almost everybody I’ve talked to in Australia over Christmas, you know, around the company, among friends scattered across the world, people are saying like, yeah, we’re ready for the horse year momentum. So, I’m also ready for the weeklong holiday.
Andrew: I love that. I hadn’t heard that, but I love it. And I’m going to lean into that. So, love that vibe check.
00:03:16
Even: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Get the spurs on.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s right. Joe, how about yourself, man. How’s your vibe?
Joe: Yeah, I’m going to confuse the metaphor by bringing a third animal into the mix and say that I’m feeling groundhog-like because it’s, first of all, just on the weather level, it got warm in Beijing the past couple days, and now it’s gotten cold again. So, I’m, you know, kind of already being put in mind of an early spring but also hoping for a continuing thaw in U.S.-China relations. So, you never know. You know, groundhogs are notoriously unreliable predictors of anything, weather and let alone geopolitics. But that’s my vibe and I’m sticking to it.
Andrew: I like it. Some listeners may not know, I lived in Beijing for 10 years and Even lived there for a long time. She’s now outside of China, but it always baffled me that Beijing is like bone dry in the winter somehow, and like sweltering hot and humid in the summer. They shouldn’t happen, right?
Joe: Yeah.
Andrew: It should be one or the other.
Joe: Yeah, it seems like a bad deal.
Andrew: Yeah, totally. Well, good luck with that, Joe. I’ll be seeing you soon there in about a month and a half, so hopefully things will warm up by then. And I’m looking forward to that. But thank you both for those vibe checks. Good headspace. Seems like some positivity in the headspace, some hedging. But that’s also fine. I am excited to talk to you both. It’s been a while, like I said, since you’ve been on the pod, so I’m excited to get to the discussion. Just quickly, to timestamp this, it’s 8.15 p.m. on Thursday, February 5th at East Coast time, so Friday morning, Chinatown, just to timestamp these so people know the information that we’re dealing with in terms of what we’re talking about.
That will matter in terms of when the Xi Jinping-Donald Trump call just happened. But before we talk about the meat of that stuff, we also have to quickly go through some housekeeping. As usual, a quick reminder, we’re not just a podcast here. Trivium China is a strategic advisory firm that helps businesses and investors navigate the China policy landscape. That, of course, includes domestic policy in China that impacts businesses, but also includes policy towards China and Western capitals like D.C., London, Brussels, and others. So, if you need any help on that front, please reach out to us at hq@triviumchina.com.
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We’re going to jump straight to U.S.-China. Joe, I’m going to open up with you. We are three months post sort of détente when Xi Jinping and Donald Trump agreed to sort of a trade truce in Busan, North Korea, at the very beginning of November.
Joe: South Korea.
Andrew: Sorry, what did I say? North Korea?
Joe: You said North Korea.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s what happens when you record a podcast in the evenings. That’s right. South Korea. So, tell us where we stand three months on. I think my impression when they kind of made this deal was, yeah, we’ll see if this thing holds. And my skepticism is starting to fade into a little bit of optimism. Are you in the same camp? Tell us what you’re thinking.
Joe: Yeah, I mean, I think if it was any other bilateral relationship, it would be more unalloyed optimism. It would be more kind of clear-cut optimism. But, you know, I think we always kind of had in mind, ever since the Busan trade truce came into effect, that, well the volatility of the Trump administration and even, in fairness, the U.S.-China relationship, even at the best of times, meant the possibility for derailment was high. But actually, I mean, what we can say is so far so good.
I mean, that was U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s assessment when he gave an interview to Fox at Davos and said, basically, the Chinese side has been holding up their end of the bargain. We’re happy with the progress on rare earths and other pieces of the Busan trade truce. And so, we can get into it in a minute with the Trump-Xi call. But, you know, that was also a very positive signal. And so, the overall impression we’re getting is, you know, a truce that really kind of has some legs.
I think it’s worth pointing out that there were some pretty serious tests that I think kind of went under the radar a little bit. The U.S. did a record-breaking weapons sale to Taiwan back in December, which anybody who even remotely follows Chinese politics knows that that’s a really easy way to get yourself in the doghouse with China. You can look at Japan as an example of that. And while China did respond with a pretty big drill, the criticism was fairly muted. I mean, that might be because while the arms deal was maybe different in terms of scope, it was the largest one in history, if I’m remembering correctly.
But that’s not unprecedented. The arms sales to Taiwan from the U.S. are a very, very longstanding thing. And so maybe, you know, they judged that the drills would be enough. But so much to say that there have been tests. And so far, the trade truce has come through fairly strongly. And it seems that the U.S. side is certainly happy, is refraining from rocking the boat. And the Chinese side also appears to be committed to keeping things stable. So yeah, I mean, I’ll say again, so far, so good.
Andrew: Yeah, maybe this is an obvious statement, but I sort of feel like every day that passes without incident makes the next day without incident more likely. Or at least that we kind of get through the initial, at least in my mind, that we get through the initial year-long agreement here.
Joe: Yeah.
Andrew: Talk to me about what you think about… So, first of all, do you think that’s right? Can we go for a full year? So, you said it’s fine now or seemingly, but does that last for another nine months in your view? And then secondly, I kind of like the one-year timeline because it actually sort of makes both sides check in. I think if it’s an open-ended timeline, then like sort of it’s easy to kind of start to feel less committed to the agreement, right? You can just start to, I don’t know, if you don’t think you can do it forever, right? You just start to weaken your commitment. But if you’re like — I can do it a year — that’s different. Will we make it to the end of the year? And what do you just think about the year timeline generally?
Joe: Yeah, I mean, if I had to put money on it, I would say yes. I think that we will make it to the end of the year without a blow-up. And I think we can say that with, I’m not going to say a high degree of confidence, but again, if I had to pick one, yes or no, I would say yes. And I think that’s for a couple of reasons. One is the upcoming Trump visit to China planned for April. That’s a really solid opportunity for China to compound the good feelings in the Trump administration.
And I think there’s a couple of really easy ways that they can do that. I mean, we sort of saw a template last year in Trump’s visit to the Middle East when he got the red carpet treatment, a bevy of companies in every location he went to came out to sign a bunch of MOUs, things that perhaps weren’t necessarily super strategic, but allowed Trump to go home and claim them as wins. I think China has a very clear path to doing that, right? It’s clear that Trump is concerned with things like rare earths. He’s concerned about agricultural purchases, a couple of kind of flashy purchases of major U.S. products like airplane engines. It doesn’t take a lot for China to offer some kind of concessions of relatively low strategic value from their point of view and possibly get a lot in return in terms of stability, good vibes, overall momentum.
And I also think apart from that, in this year, I think we’re going to see the Trump administration’s focus change significantly. First, in terms of geopolitics, right? There’s obviously a clear focus on the Western hemisphere, right? And while Trump’s focus does tend to change kind of from week to week and month to month, it does seem like that’s a pretty major shift in the way the U.S. is thinking about security policy, right? Maybe questioning the wisdom or prudence of certain aspects of that shift is maybe a discussion for another podcast. But certainly, it does seem to have taken the heat somewhat off of Asia Pacific and off of China in particular. Additionally, you get the midterms coming up. So that’s a pretty ready lever that China, if tensions were to break out again, that China could wield against the U.S.
And so, I think as the U.S., or the Trump administration turns to focus on domestic policy, you know, that’s another strong incentive for the U.S. not to rock the boat with China.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah, good points. And Even, I’ll bring you in here in just a sec. I just want to press on a couple more of these questions with Joe. So, you talked about the shift sort of towards the Western hemisphere, but there’s also been a more general shift in the Trump administration, driven largely by the president himself, away from the more aggressive posturing, more towards, if not conciliatory, very much like, we want to get along. We want China to do well. We want this relationship to be positive. What’s behind that? Is it a strategic orientation or a tactical shift that you see from the U.S. side?
Joe: Yeah, it’s really interesting. It’s certainly, I think, a strategic reorientation for the U.S. security establishment, for sure. I think that if any other president, Republican or Democrat, had kind of done things like, okayed the sale of high-end NVIDIA H200 chips to China, or had, as the Trump administration did, dismissed two officials from the Commerce Department’s Office of Information and Communications, Technology and Services, which is an office designed to kind of counter tech-related threats from China, you would have had a lot of outcry, right? But because Trump himself is reasonably favorably disposed towards China, or at least sees China as a potential deal-making partner, rather than strictly an ideological adversary, I think that that part is a strategic shift.
I think Trump has maybe kind of felt that way all along, that everything is sort of negotiable and everything’s on the table. But it is certainly a change in posture for the U.S. more broadly. But you’re right, he said exactly what you mentioned just now is in the Truth Social post that he put up after his call with Xi Jinping, he said something along the lines of, we both know how important it is for the relationship to stay strong and stable, something to that effect. And so that’s a fairly clear indication that in the absence of some major disruption or some major perceived threat to U.S. interests, does want a good relationship with China and doesn’t necessarily share the establishment view that was so commonly held in previous administrations that any ground you give China on tech or trade or whatever is a strategic misstep and a mistake.
So, I think that does then pave the way for kind of negotiations and horse trading of the type that you probably would not have seen before in U.S.-China relations.
Andrew: Yeah, great point. I’ve also heard the theory actually talking with a client today, and this is, I mean, I’ve heard it in many places, but that because of China’s very clear choke point or leverage that it has with critical minerals, that the U.S. is backing off because it sort of knows it got outplayed and they’re now cowed. And I think like that an element of that’s true.
Like the U.S. administration, the Trump administration now fully understands like the massive leverage that China has with the critical minerals and rare earth channel. But I think this is something bigger. It’s not just about that. It’s almost palpable. You feel from the administration generally coming down from the top, this idea that really would have seemed strange a year ago that Donald Trump really wants a good relationship with China.
And then Even, maybe to throw it to you on this side, China also is wanting stability. Now, I would argue they’ve always wanted stability, and they were sort of reluctantly drawn into this fight. But tell me if I’m wrong, is this a new element of their approach to the U.S. relationship? Have they had the same shift or are they kind of still sticking to their playbook that they’ve had all along?
Even: Yeah, that’s a great question. I guess I would very much agree that China is pretty consistently looking for stability as a matter of first principles in its bilateral relationships. And something that you’ve seen consistently, not just between the U.S. and China, but in Beijing’s strategy with Australia, for example, in the early 2020s, and then now we see it with Canada and the UK, is that even when the bottom has fallen out of a relationship, even when the wheels have fallen off and things have really degenerated, there is always kind of a hope and a plan to get things moving and back onto an even keel again.
And a willingness to kind of say, “Okay, how are we going to get the relationship restarted?” I mean, that tells us broadly that Beijing really views it as, you know, in their own interests to keep these relationships moving, to keep some kind of bilateral dialogue mechanisms going, to keep channels of communication open, to keep trade basically moving. And there are a bunch of different reasons for that. But yeah, just to kind of bring the threads together, I think what Beijing was targeting, matching Trump move for move throughout 2025, was a show of strength that was significant enough to get the U.S. to the negotiating table to talk about a long-term resolution, putting a long-term floor under the relationship.
And that’s why a part of what we’ve seen since the end of October that makes us feel a bit more optimistic about the direction of travel is it feels like we’ve gotten to that point, right? It feels like Beijing is pretty consistent in pursuing that. Now it feels like the U.S. side is also perhaps pursuing that same end, which is what do we both agree on in this relationship that is working? What do we both agree is not working? And how can we put guardrails around this for a longer-term reset?
Andrew: Totally. And I’m going to say this, I think people give me shit about it, but I guess I can understand why people might not agree with this and this, but I think that Xi Jinping is genuine and sincere when he says to Donald Trump things like, “Listen, we have a responsibility to manage this relationship, this exceedingly consequential relationship in a responsible manner because it has massive implications, not just for our countries and our people, but for the entire world.” And he also says things like, “Yeah, we disagree on stuff, but we can probably figure out the things we disagree on.”
Now, if you view the entire thing as a clash of ideological systems, then that’s kind of a non-starter. But my view would be that that’s not like just flowery language. I think Xi Jinping generally believes that. Joe, what do you think about what I just said? And then secondly, how do you see any changes or lack thereof from China’s approach over the past few months towards the U.S.?
Joe: Yeah, I mean, first of all, I just want to say that I fully agree with Even’s assessment that kind of just as a strategy, stability serves China very well, right? And even if you want to take the most absolutely cynical view that China is just buying time until it can get out from under the U.S. thumb in areas that matter like tech, that it’s still a reason for stability, right? They’d much rather not be having the constant up and down and back and forth that we saw throughout 2025. But it seems like at least so far, they’ve achieved that. I think that feeds into the point that you were making, Andrew, which is with any sort of political statement, it’s going to be, and not just in China, but in any country, it’s going to be half kind of true belief and half strategic posturing.
But no, I do agree. I mean, I agree is I think that there is a strain certainly in Xi Jinping’s philosophy that his responsibility is to the Chinese people, but also that there is a broader responsibility... Maybe that’s not the right way to put it, but that it benefits China when the world is stable, and for the world to be stable, U.S.-China relations have to be stable. So, I think that that’s maybe how I would characterize it. You know, I don’t think that it’s necessarily out of any kind of great humanitarian instinct per se, but I do think it is a genuinely held desire for stability.
Andrew: Yeah.
Even: Yeah. You don’t necessarily have to attribute a whole bunch of fantastic, good intent to Xi Jinping.
Andrew: Oh, totally.
Even: To understand that he wants China to be viewed as a force for good in the world and that that suits China’s strategic interests. And likewise, you know, Trump cares about power, which leads him toward China, but he also cares a lot about his legacy. The Nobel Peace Prize thing is not for nothing. He wants to be viewed as a dealmaker and a peacemaker. And I think there’s an aspect of that. He’s heading toward a lame duckitude, right? And when he thinks about how history is going to treat him, if he can strike a grand bargain with China, then he kind of sealed his place in the history books.
Andrew: Totally. And I’m glad you brought that up. Not the Nobel Prize per se, but that multiple of things can be true at the same time, right? I’m not saying that Xi Jinping has the purest of intentions. And Joe, great point. Like, yeah, he’s saying this in part because it suits his own interest of stability. But I also think it can also just be generally true that he thinks, yeah, we have a responsibility as leaders of the two leading nations of the world to try to be mature about this and try to figure out ways to work together where we can and manage our differences where we can. I think about this sort of as a business owner, right? I have conflicts with partners, not my business partners, but other companies we’re doing business with. We have partners, like there will be issues. And we just have to work through them.
Anyway, so I just think about it. And my goal is always like, let’s just come to some sort of agreement that we might not all love because the world needs to move forward and we need to protect our own interests. So anyway, I don’t know, maybe that’s too much of a digression.
Joe: No, no, the logic of go along to get along is underrated, I think.
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Well, so speaking of sort of getting along, Joe, nice way to throw that in so I could do the segway here. We had this Trump-Xi call on February 4th. So, I think it was a morning in the U.S. February 4th, evening February 4th in China. Talk to us about what happened on that call and what we can read out of it if anything.
Joe: Yeah, the call was kind of interesting for a couple of reasons. One kind of small thing I noticed is that usually when Xi Jinping or another high-level official calls a foreign official, they will usually note that if it was at the request of the other party, especially if it’s a country where that China has maybe a contentious relationship. So, they, “Oh, Xi Jinping called Donald Trump at the request of the latter. And that piece of language didn’t appear in the readout, which suggests that possibly it was initiated by the Chinese side. And I do kind of wonder why that was the case, given the fact that things seem to have been going relatively well and, as we’ve talked about, have been relatively stable in U.S.-China ties in recent months.
It does make me wonder if maybe there’s been some hemming and hawing about protocol specifics for Trump’s China visit. That’s just kind of speculation on my side. I don’t know for sure. Trump is kind of famously a last-minute Larry, and I can only imagine that drives the Chinese protocol people up the wall because they plan so meticulously and so far in advance for things like this. So, it might have been something kind of focused Trump’s attention. You know, there was a, I would say, a relatively gentle warning from Xi Jinping on Taiwan to handle the sale of weapons with prudence, I think, was the language there. And then per the Trump post on Truth Social, there was discussion about ag purchases, trade in general, purchase of airplane engines and that kind of thing.
So, the way that I read it, and again, I don’t know for sure if this was actually what happened, but it seemed to me that that it was sort of Xi Jinping dangling carrots being, “Oh yeah, if you sort out your China plans, we’ve got all this cool stuff waiting for you.? That’s just kind of my interpretation. But it does seem like it was kind of with the intent of setting the groundwork for the April visit.
Andrew: Yeah. I think your instinct is right. In fact, I have had conversations in D.C. that seem to indicate that the Trump administration is not exactly or at least hasn’t been putting a bunch of effort behind planning the trip. And specifically, like thinking through outcomes and all those things. And so, I think you’re totally right that that is well, that even if it wasn’t the impetus for the call, I’m sure that’s driving the Chinese crazy, right? So yeah, I think your instinct’s right there. Talk to me about, you know, do you have any expectations for this April trip? One thing I’ll say is part of our thinking around why we might have a lasting détente, at least for a year, is now we’ve got a very, like, seemingly confirmed trip to China by Trump in April, likely a trip by Xi to the U.S. in the fall. Those chips in of themselves are stabilizers, right? Because the government works towards getting outcomes and making sure that those state visits go well. But beyond that, any expectations from that meeting in April?
Joe: Yeah. I mean, as I was saying before, I think that where there’s a couple of things that we’re almost guaranteed to see. We’re going to be guaranteed to see the red-carpet treatment. We’re going to be guaranteed to see. I think a bunch of business leaders kind of brought to the fore to agree on things that Trump can then take home as victories and say, “Look at all the good stuff that I brought back from China.” What I’m going to be looking for is, are we going to see any kind of concessions from the U.S. side on things that are not strictly business? So maybe anything related to tech. And I think the really interesting one is going to be any changes to U.S. defense commitments in Asia Pacific.
Are Trump and she going to have some kind of heart-to-heart where, as we know, Trump is already not particularly disposed to, I guess in his mind, give us allies a freebie in the form of stationing bases there. I mean, we can debate whether that’s the right way to look at it. I would argue probably not. But is it possible that Xi Jinping has a heart-to-heart with Trump, where he convinces him to partially draw down U.S. presence in Asia Pacific to reduce commitments to Taiwan? That’s all speculative, of course, but because I think we’re pretty much guaranteed to see those trade pieces come through, I’m going to be looking for kind of bigger picture geostrategic outcomes. And whether or not we get any indication that they can kind of craft something a little bit more durable than just the one-year truce, right? If there’s any kind of building on that momentum in a meaningful way.
Andrew: Yeah, I think those are the right things to be looking for. Even, what about yourself? What are you, A, looking potentially ahead to with these meetings, but also bringing back the call, which is very much an issue in your wheelhouse? Xi Jinping and Donald Trump specifically talked about soybeans. So, that might be on the agenda in April. But talk to us about they got sort of weirdly specific about what the soybean discussion was. What was that all about?
Even: Yeah. I guess just to be weirdly specific about the strange specificity, this only came out in Trump’s post. The soybean stuff, the agricultural products didn’t even make a mention in China’s readout of the meeting. But after the call wrapped up, Trump hopped on Truth Social as usual and kind of dumped his own view on what they talked about. And one of the things in that was he indicated that he’d suggested that maybe China should buy a 20 million metric tons of soybeans this season instead of the 12 million tons that they’ve already purchased under the deal that was worked out in Busan. You know, that was eye-catching. First, it immediately impacted soybean prices across the U.S. and around the world, because it kind of shifted expectations that there might be some additional Chinese buying coming down the pike.
But what that would require is another 8 million tons of purchases by China at a time when those purchases don’t really make market sense for Chinese buyers to be making. And it translates into a little over $3 billion U.S. worth of purchases that are outside of a market logic. It would be much cheaper for Chinese buyers to go to Brazil for those soybeans right now. I’ve heard some speculation, I don’t follow sort of volumes and supply on the U.S. side very closely at all, but I’ve heard some speculation that actually the U.S. doesn’t have that additional 8 million tons of soybeans kicking around after the last harvest. That those have all pretty much been accounted for already, and that they’re going in other directions into other programs until they’re buyers.
So, it kind of begs the question, what would motivate China, after the fact, to agree to buy another few million U.S. dollars’ worth of soybeans? And that’s where we start to be able to say, well, what can Washington trade? What would that look like in April? If China buys a few billion dollars’ worth of soybeans between now and the state visit, then what happens in exchange? And in addition to some of those items that Joe’s already mentioned, one of the first places that I’m looking is sanctions list, is U.S. government sanctions list. You know, those are in the hands of the executive branch, which means Trump’s administration could kind of directly have a role in adjusting those. We’re still waiting on the new Defense Department list of Chinese military companies, which has often come out in January, but sometimes a bit later.
So far, we haven’t got the 2026 update yet, which means that maybe there are companies, there’s been whispers about a bunch of different companies, including some big tech that could be newly listed. That CNC list is now going to feed into the Bio Secure Act process of determining which companies are sort of blacklisted for government, being a supplier to a multinational pharma that then services U.S. federal government contracts. That seems like the kind of bargaining chip that could be in play here.
Andrew: And it seems sort of proportional. Yeah. I mean, they seem like things are kind of match in terms of the size of the move. Let me bring Joe back in here quickly because we’re going to lose him here in a few minutes to his busy day in Beijing. But Joe, first question, I mean, what do you think Beijing’s asks might be kind of along the lines Even was laying out? And then I want to pivot to sort of not strictly U.S. tech China and talk about some other things that are going on in the world that are impacting China and the U.S.-China relationship and global geopolitics.
Joe: Yeah. I mean, frankly, I think Even kind of laid it out there. At some point, we kind of don’t know what we don’t know at this stage. And I do wonder if this will be an opportunity for China to really kind of put some audacious asks on the table. I mean, sanctions relief could be one. The defense command piece could be another. Tech is a little bit more complicated due to the fact that China views U.S. tech as a bit of a poisoned chalice, and that might undermine a push forward for domestic self-reliance. But yeah, I’m really not sure. I think that it may be a chance for China to really put some unconventional asks out there, but at this stage, I don’t really know necessarily what those would be.
Andrew: Yeah, well, and we won’t get into this now, but there has been reporting, at least in some of the Western newspapers, I’m sure they’re reporting is solid, but you never know if the information they’re getting is being fed for various reasons. But that Xi Jinping may want to push Trump hard to soften language on Taiwan. Right? That would be like a really, really big ask. Like, to take it to the next level. We won’t get into that necessarily now. I will have both of you back on before the April trip. We’ll have a ton of issues to talk through in due course, so we will come back to these. But before I lose you, Joe, so we just talked about how the U.S.-China is this like sort of the island of stability in this sea of geopolitical chaos, largely driven by the U.S., right?
The Venezuela move. You talked about the Trump administration’s pivot to the Western Hemisphere, all of the writing in the wake of the Venezuela move was that China has lost all of its influence with Venezuela is wiped out in 24 hours. And then you also have this week the Panamanian court’s ruling against China or a Chinese company in terms of its ownership stake or operational stake in the ports on the Panama Canal. What’s going on in the Western Hemisphere in terms of China’s footprint? Is it really kind of knocked back of step here? Or just kind of walk us through your general thoughts on how there is impacting the China side.
Joe: Yeah. I mean, I kind of think that there has been a chilling effect as a result of U.S. actions, and it should be noted that this kind of goes back further than the recent abduction of Nicolas Maduro, the former president of Venezuela. Right? The Panama Canal thing, I mean, that harkens back to the first couple of months of Trump’s second term when he said, you know, “We want it,” and then essentially leaned on Panama to withdraw from the Belt and Road Initiative. And so, as Trump does, he kind of has moved on to something else. I haven’t heard him mention the Panama Canal in quite some time.
And so, the recent Panama Supreme Court ruling, they have been saying it’s been in train for a long time for something that Trump no longer really cares about. But no, he is focused on the Western Hemisphere. And one point here is that the better that U.S.-China relations are, the more space there is for China to maintain and continue to build up its influence in Latin America. The U.S. is only going to try to push China out of Latin America to the extent it sees China as a threat.
If it doesn’t see China as much of a threat, then there’s still more latitude for China to do things like defend its stake in the ports on the Panama Canal, to continue to cultivate good relationships. The ones I really feel sorry for are the LATAM countries themselves, who now feel themselves very much stuck between a rock and a hard place. Right? In the case of Panama, China warned in no uncertain terms that there would be major consequences as a result of this ruling. And sure enough, just I think yesterday, we got media reporting that China’s instructed state-owned companies to halt new projects in Panama. So that’s kind of a very clear stick that they’re facing, right? I’m thinking about Mexico, who a couple months ago agreed to new tariffs on Chinese imports, largely due to implicit or explicit U.S. pressure.
And so, China needs to walk a little bit carefully and strike a balance between defending its interests, defending these relationships in Latin America without pissing off the U.S., but the ones who are really going to be feeling the pressure are the LATAM countries themselves who are facing the threat of punishment from two economic giants.
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess they can maybe have a… pity party is not the right word, but they can commiserate with the Southeast Asian countries who’ve been caught in the middle of this for a long time, right?
Joe: Yeah, many such cases.
Andrew: Well, thanks a bunch for that, Joe. You ran us through a lot of different stuff. I know you’ve got to drop. So, I appreciate the time. And we’ll definitely have you back on soon. And I’ll see you in six weeks or so. So, thanks a bunch.
Joe: All right. Thanks, guys. Bye.
Andrew: So, Even just kind of following up on where we just ended with Joe on the Latin America stuff, obviously China has been investing heavily in Latin America, and not just sourcing things like soybeans and a lot of other commodities, but also investing in the resource space and in building, increasingly doing manufacturing, obviously, investing in projects and infrastructure and that kind of stuff. Is that kind of economic footprint likely to change in any way because of the dynamics Joe was just talking about in your view?
Even: Yeah, I mean, that’s the multibillion-dollar question at the moment. But I would contend that in a lot of places that Beijing has kind of been working within the limits or the constraints that are posed by operating in the Western Hemisphere for quite a while. The U.S. has, to a greater or lesser extent, always viewed the region as its strategic backyard. Obviously, Trump is doubling and tripling down on that view. But Beijing has proceeded, I think, fairly cautiously into the region and really, really focused on projects that have sort of a clear commercial case.
It’s not building military infrastructure or something across Latin America. It’s building effectively export oriented infrastructure. And I think another piece of the equation is what Latin America, particularly South America, is exporting to China is really sort of primary industry raw materials-focused portfolio. And that’s stuff that China demands in really, really large volumes. But it’s what the U.S. kind of produces in really large volumes. So, Brazil is supplying all of these soybeans and other grains and oilseeds and supplying beef. That’s also what the U.S. traditionally exports to China. The U.S. doesn’t have a massive import market for some of these commodities and raw materials.
And so, the partnership, you know, the economic, the trade partnership between China and a large swath of Latin America is really kind of grounded in an economic logic where the U.S. doesn’t offer a replacement. So, I might contend, you know, we might see a much quieter sort of diplomatic outreach, a little bit more caution from, you know, state owned firms. But in terms of what that economic and trade relationship looks like, I don’t think that there’s going to be much of an economic case, I guess, for a reorientation. We’re still going to see really strong trade relationships.
And what that has meant is that regardless of the political positioning, there’s quite a bit of political volatility in Latin America as well, where you get these big swings between kind of hard left leaning populist governments and then a bit more of the hard right-learning, often populist governments. But even a Maduro to a Bolsonaro, regardless of sort of who you’ve got in office, you’ve got leaders that have been willing to work with Beijing because of that huge economic relationship.
Andrew: Totally. And I’ve said, like I mentioned earlier, the writing, you know, all the Western commentary is, oh, China’s just lost, you know, decades’ worth of progress in Latin America overnight. I just don’t buy it. I mean, first of all, they haven’t been investing there. And not just money – time, right? Time on the ground. Building relationships not just with governments, but with businesses, which outlasts governments most of the time. So, they’ve been investing, and it’s not like the Latin American businesses or even parts of the government are just going to walk away from those, relationships and those investments and sort of both time and money.
And so, I think I agree with you. China might have a little bit of a quieter profile for a while if it looks like there is some level of realignment. But the other thing I’d say is first, just talking about Venezuela is the government is still fully intact and Venezuela, like nothing has changed except for the top leader. Right? Everyone else is like the vice president stepped up and now everyone is there. And we’ll see what happens from here. If the Chavanistas is a man in charge in Venezuela, China is still going to have all those relationships, I think. And so, I think it really matters not just kind of the taking out of Maduro, but what happens next, who’s governing the country going forward?
And then secondly, it also matters what Venezuela tells us about the US is Latin America strategy more broadly, right? Is it trying to really throw its weight around and is there a strategy, and is the U.S. going to put sustained pressure on Latin America, especially South American countries, to move away from China towards the U.S.? Or was Venezuela kind of a one off? I think people are reading a lot in terms of we’ve moved a few carriers, we’ve messed with Venezuela in a big way, but I don’t know if that’s a sustained strategy. And so, I’m just not quite ready to say, oh, whatever. All is lost for China and South America. But we’ll see. We’ll see.
Even: Yeah, yeah. A couple more quick points on that if you don’t mind. One is that it may actually be to Beijing’s advantage for these doom and gloom narratives to make the rounds that, you know, if China’s economic relationship with Venezuela and, more broadly, across Latin America is pretty robust and likely to remain intact, and a whole bunch of op ed writers sort of more or rather celebrate, you know, the China’s big loss in Latin America, then that buys a bit of time and cover for that relationship to just quietly work, much as it has been for a few more years of Trump’s administration.
But the second piece that I think is quite interesting, I spent some time earlier in 2025, kind of elbow deep in how the think tanks that work on China’s Latin America policy view the U.S. and Latin America. And the really big criticism that Chinese scholars are focused on is the idea that the U.S. has a negative Latin America policy rather than a positive one. The U.S. knows what they don’t want. They don’t want immigration or illegal immigration. They don’t want drug cartels. They don’t want certain kinds of trade. They don’t want certain kinds of other countries’ involvement. They don’t want certain kinds of political orientations within those countries. But the U.S. government hasn’t articulated a positive strategy. What do they actually want to see?
What are they willing to offer in order to see that? Where are they investing? That piece of the equation is more muddled. And I think Beijing has really been leaning into that. So, when we look at Beijing’s strategy in Latin America, it’s about building infrastructure, it’s about landing projects. It’s about helping add value to overall commodity streams coming out of Latin America, you know, whenever and wherever possible. And it’s really got this kind of positive energy to it. Beijing, I don’t think, has ever tried to dictate terms about negative aspects of Latin America. We don’t like this about your regime, or we don’t like this about drug cartels or whatever else, you know, and part of that is just distance. China doesn’t have to reckon with any of those negative issues that the U.S. does.
But putting that aside, the differences in those policy orientations are really clear, and it makes Beijing an appealing partner.
Andrew: Yeah, for sure, for sure. Well, we covered a lot of ground on the geo-pol side. But while I have you, I also have to take the advantage here of your expertise, specifically in the agricultural sector, to talk to what was really kind of the biggest domestic policy development this week in China, which is the annual publication of the No. 1 Document. So, first of all, just kind of tell people what the No. 1 Document is and why we care about it, and then we can talk about maybe can what’s in there that matters. And what was different from the previous No. 1 Documents.
Even: So, the No. 1 Document is published each year by the Party Central Committee and cosigned by the State Council. It is the first policy document issued by the Party each year, and it has been, for the last 23 years in a row, focused squarely on what China calls the three rural issues, basically agriculture, farmers and rural residents, and then rural development. And the reason for that is that food security and world stability are really viewed as crucial for maintaining political stability in China. So, the Party views this is really kind of central to maintaining their control of the party state. And that’s true for a bunch of historical reasons. But there’s been a really consistent cross-cutting, it doesn’t matter who’s been in charge in the top job in Beijing.
There’s been this really consistent understanding that outcomes for all folks, and secondarily, food security, right? First, averting a famine, but now kind of making sure that food price and supply is staying decent, even though there’s more imports in the mix, you know, that that’s really central to keeping the government and the Party in power.
Andrew: Yeah. So, thanks for that background. Excellent stage setting for us. You mentioned to me that a couple of things jumped up to you. We were just talking about soybean purchases, you know, Latin American sales of agricultural goods to China. You mentioned there are a few items in the No. 1 Document that may pique the ears or perk the ears of people who are sort of exposed to global ag commodity markets. What do you see on that front?
Even: Yeah, definitely. So, it’s no big secret that China has spent years trying to reduce its reliance on the U.S., and the U.S.’s close allies like Canada and Australia for like staple grains and oilseeds. Looking back a decade or so, China was buying maybe 70% of staple grains in oilseed imports from the U.S. and just a couple of its very closest allies. They’ve invested heavily, arguably, the Belt and Road Initiative was in part a strategy to build a trade infrastructure to enable China to buy more agricultural commodities from places that weren’t a handful of developed countries. And that’s sort of about diversification, right? That your import mix is more secure if you’re able to source from a whole bunch of partners.
And it’s worth noting that this year’s No. 1 Document actually mentioned diversification three times in the document in three different respects when talking about food security. First, with respect to trade partners. So, this emphasis on making sure that China can source food from as many different places as possible, even after a decade of effort on this front, it’s still like really firmly on the agenda. And what that means is we’ll be looking for, it takes a lot of work to open market access, and when there are countries that are small, maybe less developed, it can be a bit hard to make sure, can these farmers hit the quality standards, make sure there isn’t pests or diseases that are coming through and crops that they’re exporting to China?
So, it takes a lot of work to get new market access open. And if we’re talking about diversification of trade partners in the No. 1 Document, it means the Ministry of Ag and Rural Affairs is going to keep doing that work. So, we’ll see more market access from more countries across the developed world as a matter of priority this year. But we also saw a couple more mentions of diversification, one about the food system as a whole. So, Chinese policymakers have really, really focused on staple grains like rice and wheat as the foundation of food security for decades and decades.
But just in the past few years, there’s been the effort to try to look more broadly, to have a broader concept of what food security is, because, frankly speaking, you know, the Chinese diet in 2026 is a lot less rice and wheat, you know, a lot less noodles and ping and rice and congee, and it’s a lot more meat and veg and fruits and snacks and all kinds of other stuff. That’s good news of what comes along with the rise in per capita income and good development outcomes and a lot of development in agriculture. But it also, you know, it requires sort of a different view on where food security comes from, right? Because you could store all the rice and wheat in the world.
And if there was suddenly some kind of black swan event, that wouldn’t much matter to the people who were waiting around for their next meal, which is no longer rice and wheat all day, every day. And then the third place that diversification was mentioned was with respect to oilseeds, oil crops specifically. And so, what that kind of implies is that Beijing has been obsessed with soybeans for a number of years, I think for fairly obvious reasons. China is very, very import dependent for soybeans. They’ve been getting a lot of them from the U.S. Now they’re getting most of them from Brazil. But that’s just one place.
So, policymakers are keen to kind of think about what other oil crops they could be using, both what they’re planting domestically, like expanding rapeseed, expanding peanuts, maybe let’s have a look at coconut. And also, what they’re importing as well. Thinking more broadly about whether we can replace some of these soybeans with other kinds of oil crops to diversify what’s in that mix. And all three of those will have an impact on what domestic policy looks like, but also what trade preferences market access and trade flows look like as well.
Andrew: And you also mentioned that when it comes to sort of these global ag markets that they were looking at stabilizing specifically their beef and dairy industries. So, maybe you can touch on that as well. And then we’ll get into kind of what I would say is maybe the evolving strategy, maybe, when it comes to the ag sector overall, but touch on that dairy and ag piece.
Even: Yeah, definitely. So, this isn’t a massive section of the document, but there were a couple little details about the need to build on progress from last year and stabilizing the beef and dairy sector. The beef and dairy sectors in China went through a couple of rough years where, pretty consistently, profitability was negative, where the costs of running anything that involved cattle were higher than farmers were able to recoup from selling the products that were coming out the other end. And we’ve seen kind of a full court press in terms of how that’s getting managed in domestic policy.
But one of the big outcomes of that has been some interventions into trade. On the EU side, we saw the scaled-down, but still not nothing anti-subsidy investigation that resulted in some tariffs being applied to a number of product categories of EU dairy. That creates a bit more space for China’s domestic dairy farmers to make some money in the market. And then on beef, we saw the outcome of that safeguard investigation, which is basically kind of a specialized sort of WTO trade measure that allows countries that have discovered substantial harm to their domestic sectors to create a shelter for those domestic sectors, as long as they do it fairly or equally across all global trade partners. So, China’s beef cattle industry domestically now has safeguard measures over it, which has built a quota system that’s going to limit imports of beef from every single major beef exporter that has market access in China.
And for both of those measures, this is going to be the first year that that’s in effect. It should enable a bit more space for domestic beef and dairy to regain footing. But more broadly, it’s a pretty strong signal that Beijing is committed to maintaining and growing its domestic beef and dairy production. That’s been kind of a long road. It’s hard to grow new industries in the first place. It’s even harder in agriculture. But Beijing kind of looks at a lot of vast pastoral lands out in western China and says, “There’s a lot more land we could be doing some kind of productive agriculture on,” and that needs to be like grazing livestock or something, or growing hay for the livestock, and they’re looking at cattle in particular, is a place where China might be able to see to more of its own food security.
So those industries are going to get a hand up. One last little tidbit for the dairy sector is that there was an explicit call to promote consumption of dairy products. We saw a similar call a couple years back when the No. 1 Document said that it would promote consumption of fresh milk, basically meaning stuff that’s not shelf stable. And that’s where the domestic producers have a much better time getting those products to market than an imported product, which has to travel a lot longer. So, it’s probably has a much shorter shelf life by the time it gets to China.
But this year, they’re saying dairy products as a whole that their consumption will be promoted. So, there could be some kind of consumer subsidy. Sometimes that looks like schools or large SOEs doing procurement and then giving out yogurt or cheese or something from domestic dairy companies so that consumers kind of get a taste for a product that maybe they’re less familiar with. And that’s in the dock this year. So, it means it’s probably going to be a fair bit of cash toward that.
Andrew: Awesome. Yeah. So that’s great stuff in terms of laying out what’s going to impact sort of the market side of things, or at least China’s like main touchpoints with external agricultural and other food and grain markets. I want you to now dig into sort of the evolution of kind of the strategy on ag policy as reflected in this No. 1 Document, which I think you wrote about this, or actually you’ve written about it, but it won’t be published until this weekend.
So, listeners, be on the lookout for our weekly piece, which Even has taken the lead on This week. But the approach is evolving, right? It used to be very, I don’t know what the right word is — using blunt tools. Like we need to grow X amount of Y to feed ourselves, right? It was all about just having enough. And now it’s about really boosting efficiency, thinking more smartly about how the ag sector works more generally and how it fits into the economy. So, talk to us about what you saw that was truly new in the doc in terms of that overarching strategy towards the sector.
Even: Yeah, that’s a great question. Of course, like with most Chinese policy documents, the ultimate focus of what the Party is doing with the No. 1 Document is domestic, and its foreign audience, you know, of domestic agricultural policymakers, first and foremost, to help them kind of get moving in the right direction, in alignment with what the Party center wants to see in the coming year. So, sometimes some of the most interesting takeaways, like it’s hard to make them immediately commercially relevant, but it’s telling a story that’s going to kind of shape and reshape the agricultural and rural economy, probably over the next five years, since this is the first year in a five year plan period. Right? So, it really struck me that there were a couple of new kind of details in the document this year.
The new quality, productive forces thinking is really kind of making its way into the doc, making its mark on the document in a big way. We got the first mention of a whole bunch of technologies like drones and robots. China has been one of the world leading suppliers of agricultural drones for a few years now, but this is the first time that they’re showing up in the No. 1 Document. That tells us top leaders are thinking about these key technologies that they think can play a big role in contributing productivity in the farming economy, and also play a big role in navigating what is effectively a massive demographic cliff, with the average age of farm workers in China being up over 50 by most accounts.
That it’s kind of only a matter of time until, along with the aging population, that there are a lot fewer people to kind of do the hard and heavy work of agriculture. And alongside that, there’s also a hint in the doc this year that there’s going to be some reform of the agricultural technology extension system, which basically means the central government is focused not just on producing these technologies, but also addressing that kind of last mile problem of how do you get them into the field, how do you make sure they make sense on farms? How do you make sure farmers can access drones, which are a bit tricky to operate? How do you get that pipeline between a new tech or a new innovation getting into the field? So, the first step in doing that is making sure you’ve got a robust extension system. And these kinds of systems exist in almost every country in the world.
The U.S. has ag extension officers that are running out of USDA, and China also has an ag extension system, but it’s been ignored and kind of underfunded and underutilized for a number of years. But now it looks like there’s going to be a reform agenda there, into putting more tech out into the hands of farmers. But secondarily, and you kind of hinted it at this piece in the question is that these productivity related shifts are going along with an even more interesting kind of structural change within the document, which is that all of the discussion of support, like direct financial, like fiscal support to farming, like subsidies, like crop insurance and like minimum purchase prices or price intervention and price management, all of that was moved out of the document section on agricultural production, and it was moved into a section that’s about raising farm income.
And that’s a bit arcane. But what it seems to indicate is that this is an ideological pivot. It means that when top leaders are thinking about agricultural production, they’re thinking about it as an industry that needs to focus on production capacity, technology, scaling up, improving infrastructure, using better seeds, better machines, investing in irrigation systems, etc. And they’re no longer thinking about agriculture as a system where you need to hand out subsidies in order to try to motivate 400 million small farming households to plant what the central government wants. Instead, they’re saying the support to farmers isn’t supporting food security, it’s supporting social security, which that’s a big kind of change.
Andrew: Yeah. That’s interesting. Talk to us a little bit about the sort of expanding social program, because this document isn’t just about farming, it’s about rural areas generally and life in rural areas. So, talk to us about what the document said on that front in terms of expanding social programs for people in these areas.
Even: Yeah, there’s a pretty significant commitment within the doc to kind of expanding sort of spending on rural welfare effectively. So, back before 2020, Xi Jinping spent years investing in the poverty eradication campaign, where in 2020, Beijing declared that they had completely eradicated extreme poverty. Every country or county, rather where there was structural poverty, that it had been totally eliminated through these interventions. And the targeted welfare and like emergency relief efforts that were built as a result of that campaign, then there was a lot of fear that they were just going to disappear, right? And then people would slide back into poverty.
So, for the past five years, the government has kind of put them into a transition phase. And beginning this year, what the document says is that these programs are going to become normalized or regularized. So, all of those assistance mechanisms for somebody who, for example, like had a medical emergency and suddenly, as a result, couldn’t work and spent all of their savings and now they’re destitute, those mechanisms that were kind of a temporary campaign effort before, now they’re going to be in place kind of permanently. We don’t know exactly what that’s going to mean in terms of like a change in the fiscal commitment, but it sounds expensive.
And, you know, there are also a few other places where we can see in the document that there’s going to be more investment in rural grassroots public health infrastructure, which was identified as a really obvious weakness during the pandemic period. And it looks like there’s going to be more fiscal support toward eldercare for people in rural areas based on the language in the document. So, the No. 1 Doc is a statement of intent, but it doesn’t come with funding. So, we still have to wait and see. But we’ll watch for whether the Ministry of Finance budget at the two sessions gives us a sense of how much extra money might be flowing in the direction of these formal social services’ expansion this year.
Andrew: And then final question for you, just in the near term, you talked about sort of how the idea of subsidies for farming is evolving and that there’s this structural difference in terms of how that was characterized in terms of the support for the ag sector. What does that mean practically in the near term, if anything, for 2026?
Even: It’s hard to say. I think in the near term, it’s very unlikely that funding support programs like farm subsidies, like ag insurance will be reduced as a result of that structural shift. If anything, we’re expecting those funding streams to increase. But kind of what’s changed is the policy logic behind why they’re happening and the goals, whether those are about farming output or whether they’re just about creating social stability.
So, when I think about what this might mean in the medium term, it seems like reframing rural income growth as like separate from agricultural production and food security will give officials a great deal, more flexibility in terms of how they pursue productivity in the ag sector. That means they’ll have more flexibility to push for larger and larger farm sizes, right? How do we do more land transfer in a more robust way, even if that means that people are exiting, farmers are no longer working on farms, and they’re doing something else? It means that policymakers will be able to continue encouraging efficiency even when it pushes ag and food prices down. And that’s something that we’ve seen pretty consistently, right?
For example, in the pig farming sector, over the last 5 to 6 years, the pig farming sector has scaled up really, really fast in response to African swine fever, but also in response to a whole bunch of government finance that was available to allow them to weather the storm of African swine fever. The pig farming sector scaled up, it got a lot more efficient, and as a result, there’s a bit of overproduction and prices cratered, right? And that’s put some pressure on the agricultural economy. But effectively, we’re getting a message from central leadership that says we want this productivity, we want this efficiency. We’re going to solve farm incomes in a different way, continue to chase the productivity, and we’ll sort out the rural income piece separately.
And what that means, you know, is that over the medium term, we could see a much more efficient and a much more productive farming sector in China.
Andrew: Yeah. And I mean, Chinese economists say this all the time — I think that it’s underappreciated or under-recognized, just how much productivity gains can be made in the ag sector and in the rural economy generally. I think obviously everyone looks at new, quality productive forces and thinks it’s just a Chinese-ism, a Party-speak term. But if there’s any place that it can be applied, where productivity boosting measures can be readily applied, it’s in ag, right?
Even: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. There’s still a lot of, I would say, really, really low hanging fruit from a development perspective that exists out in the rural economy. There’s still a huge number of people that could be freed up from a basically breakeven existence and into having more productive, more higher income earning options that would enable them to consume. There are still a lot of efficiency and productivity that could be gained simply by digitizing some stuff, by adopting technologies that…
Andrew: We talked about the drone’s piece.
Even: Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the biggest challenges in China’s farming sector, and especially in high value stuff like fruits and tea, is that the landscape is pretty extreme. You’ve got farming plots that are on the mountainsides, and that’s the right climate zone for things to be growing. And you can do orchards in those contexts. But it really, really slows down at harvest time or if you have to get out in the field to do anything, spraying fungicides, just making sure pollination is working right, it’s just massively labor intensive. It requires human labor crawling up and down the sides of mountains. Right? And drones can be really game changing in those contexts. And the more that China is getting into really advanced automation and like drone swarms, like we see those as a replacement for fireworks displays, you know, in Pudong, in Shanghai.
But imagine what a totally automated travel cloud could do out on a mountainside where it’s harvesting something that’s super high value and has never been able to be brought to market just in time before. Like, there’s some real potential.
Andrew: Yeah. Well, Even, fascinating stuff. We’ll be watching all of this on an ongoing basis, of course. I think we’ll be doing hopefully, and sounds like some interesting research into applications of technology across kind of the ag space, biotech, and a bunch of other areas here soon. So, we’ll keep listeners updated on that. But in the meantime, thanks so much for joining me today, lending us your expertise for both on the deep dive on ag but also on the geo-pol stuff. Really appreciate the time. Good to see you.
Even: Yeah, yeah. Great to be here.
Andrew: Appreciate it. And thanks everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time. Bye, everybody.
