Xi-Trump summits reopen a question Western brands thought they had settled

Xi Jinping (习近平) and Donald Trump will meet twice more before the year is out — at the APEC leaders’ meeting in Shenzhen on November 18 and 19, then at the G20 in Miami in mid-December. The trade truce between their countries expires on January 10, under four weeks after the second of them. Summits are judged on their agreements. The more durable consequence is usually the set of assumptions executives start rewriting in between. I thought back to a dinner in Shanghai with a senior US diplomat, not long after Xi’s state visit to Washington in September. It took up most of the conversation. He noted that the positive reading had already moved beyond media commentary and into government discussions. What stayed with me was the next beat. People stopped asking what had happened and started asking what they might now try. No amount of summitry takes tariffs off the table. Washington produced no breakthrough on rare earths, the sharpest dispute between the two sides, and the truce covering it dates from Busan rather than from anything agreed in September. None of it ends the strategic contest. Strategy has never waited for that kind of clarity. It starts when leaders decide yesterday’s assumptions may not be good enough for the next decision. For much of the past five years the questions were familiar. How much China exposure should we cut, and how fast do we diversify? Those questions made sense. They sat on an assumption that Washington and Beijing would keep drifting apart. The September visit did not disprove that. It put another future back in the room. Companies rarely wait for every policy to move before they reposition. They move when they think the direction of travel might be changing. That is why business leaders should pay attention, even if the politics later go somewhere else. A warmer official relationship does not create demand. Consumers do not buy countries. The operating question is the one that matters here. How do you actually work across that border now? What did international brands learn from buying back their China licenses, and why might that calculation look different a decade later? My own experience covers one full cycle of this in China. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, licensing was often how you got in. The market was unfamiliar. The rules were complex. International brands looked for Chinese partners who already knew distribution and the customer. Then China got too big to leave with someone else. Rooms I sat in had a simple brief: buy the rights back, unwind the partner, bring the customer and the brand in-house. Direct ownership became the default because China was going to be one of the largest markets, and headquarters did not want that relationship sitting with someone else. That was the right call for those conditions. I am less sure it is the obvious one now. None of that follows from the September summit. Chinese competitors are faster on product and on price than they were when those licenses were bought back. Owning the whole China business is also expensive. A partner who already knows the trade can be worth more than full control, especially if you still want capital for other markets. Calmer relations do not cause that. If anything, less political noise makes direct ownership feel safer. What the visit does is lower the cost of testing the other structure. If local speed matters more than a flag on the door, ownership matters less than a partner who can move. Why did General Motors extend a China joint venture through 2047 after writing down more than $5B in the market? Buick is useful here because it did not evolve smoothly. What began as a market-entry joint venture between General Motors and SAIC became a place where cars were engineered rather than only assembled. Then the volumes went. SAIC-GM delivered around 2 million vehicles in 2017 and 562,000 in 2025, a fall of roughly 75%, and GM took more than $5 billion in China restructuring charges and closed plants. Both partners renewed anyway. In August they extended the venture through 2047, narrowing it to Buick and Cadillac, committing to at least 30 new energy vehicles by 2030 and building around Electra, a sub-brand on an architecture GM describes as the first developed under Chinese leadership. Seen that way, the partnership bought dismantling rather than rescue. GM closed the old business down and kept a smaller, more profitable one behind it, with the product work staying in China. Whether joint ventures beat ownership is the wrong question. The structure has to move when the conditions underneath it move. Can Chinese brands entering the United States skip the licensing and ownership cycle that Western companies spent two decades working through in China? Chinese brands going the other way can use that record. They can see which partnerships created value and which ones blew up. The failures were usually governance, not the idea of a partner. A well-structured agreement protects the brand, pricing, customer data and the exit. Without those protections, the local operator can end up owning the business in practice. With them, a foreign brand can enter without pretending it already understands the market. Western companies did not have that record when they entered China in the 1990s. Chinese brands entering the United States do. They do not have to replay the whole cycle. This is not a forecast that licensing comes back as the main model. Direct ownership will still be right for some brands. The September summit did not answer that. It simply made the question worth asking again. China State of Play is a strategic intelligence program from Jing Daily and Other Logic Partners. Angelito Tan is co-founder of Other Logic Partners, where he advises CEOs and founders of premium brands on Asia strategy. Drawing on more than 25 years of operating and advisory experience across the region, he writes about the strategic, cultural and commercial forces shaping how Chinese and Asian premium brands are redefining global markets.

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Xi-Trump summits reopen a question Western brands thought they had settled