Trump’s fickle, Xi’s pickle: the dynamic driving US-China tensions

0:27The Economist Our correspondent explores one of the gruesome side effects of this sad story, the pileup of bodies in Spanish morgues along the sea routes. And at a time when the video game industry pulls in more than the movie industry does, you'd be forgiven for thinking pinball had been consigned to history. Our correspondent finds that it's not only hanging on, it's enjoying a revival.

1:02But first...

1:10One thing about wars is that they reveal what each side perceives as the other's vulnerability. Russia strikes at Ukraine's energy infrastructure. Israel crimps the flow of aid to Gaza. Now that tariff threats have become tariffs, have become a trade war, the pain points between China and America are becoming clearer. As the American market or Chinese goods is being choked off, President Xi Jinping is touring Southeast Asia, making nice with trading partners.

1:44China and Malaysia will stand with countries in the region, he said. He's also making overtures to the European Union. Smoothing and expanding trade networks will help China, but what will hurt America? The export controls imposed this week on rare earths, for one thing. These minerals figure into all kinds of tech, including that for defense. And China's aviation regulator told airlines to stop taking deliveries of Boeing aircraft. But there's a bigger picture here that's shaping how things are going, a kind of vulnerability that's exposed by an almighty mismatch in negotiating style. Both China and America are busy pumping out the propaganda that they hold all the cards and that the other side has made a terrible mistake.

2:31David Rennie is our geopolitics editor. And I think China's confidence is partly based in reality. They feel their economy is ready for this. They had prepared for it and that they are tougher politically than America is. And that once prices really start to bite on the American side, that Donald Trump may blink. That said, China's toughness and discipline is in some ways a disadvantage when it comes to dealing with someone as utterly unpredictable and chaotic as Donald Trump. And so we're in this game of chicken at the moment where both sides are saying that the other one is going to have to blink first.

3:07So part of this game of chicken is that both sides are claiming they have the upper hand, they hold the cards. What do you make of that? I think we're entitled to be a bit suspicious of some of the American claims. So we saw Donald Trump send out his spokeswoman, Carolyn Levitt, to the podium of the White House with a statement that she said he dictated. The ball is in China's court. China needs to make a deal with us. We don't have to make a deal with them. So Jason, I don't know how much of a poker player you are, but in my version of poker, if you really have a completely winning hand, you don't start telling your opponent that they're a loser and they need to fold right now and don't dare raise on me.

3:44It sounded a little more desperate than a guy with all the aces might sound. But is this an effect of an entirely different kind of negotiation, kind of trade war than the world is essentially used to in these kinds of games of upper hands? Yeah. So one of the ironies of this whole situation is that if this were a trade confrontation, which was literally a test of strength, where it was whose economy is more resilient, whose economy has alternative markets, alternative sources, then you can play a really interesting game about actually China can buy soybeans from Brazil and Argentina if it stops buying American soybeans.

4:21And actually, China controls this or that rare earth mineral that it can cut off to America. But yes, half a trillion dollars worth of stuff is shipped from China to America every year, and China doesn't want to lose that market. But the problem is that Donald Trump is playing an extremely chaotic, unpredictable, somewhat illogical game, and a very disciplined Chinese Communist Party that is all about planning and shaping the agenda and negotiating in a kind of very logical way, finds that impossible to deal with. I mean, in a sense, that would be a vindication of the sort of Trumpian madman theory of negotiation.

5:01Yes, the problem is that the trick of the madman theory is don't actually just be mad. And there is a problem. I was just in Washington last week. There's genuinely an incoherence that isn't just 4D chess and tactical. If you listen to cabinet secretaries in the Trump administration, they can offer three or four different competing explanations as to why they began this trade war and what they want China to do. Is it designed to have tariffs that are so high that factories move from China to America? or is this an invitation for China to cut a big beautiful deal and make the tariffs go way down?

5:34Well if they go way down then why would the factories still move because that's a completely clashing objective and so I think from the Chinese perspective there's a lack of logic. The other massive problem they have is that it's very clear that even more than in Donald Trump's first term in this second term even his cabinet secretaries are not in charge of this. This is one man driving this. And he changes his mind several times a day. And so other countries are getting their president, their prime minister, to try and cut deals directly with Donald Trump. And that idea of a sort of mano a mano negotiation just doesn't land well in China.

6:08No. If you are the Chinese communist leadership, you cannot send your supreme leader, who's a kind of red emperor wrapped up in dignity and this sense of absolute authority, He doesn't go into an open-ended negotiation just to wing it and certainly can't go into any meeting with an American leader, which is not going to end up in success. And so at the extreme, the video that everyone in the world saw of Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, being humiliated in the Oval Office, there is no Chinese official on the face of the earth that would ever send Xi Jinping into any sort of meeting that could end up like that.

6:47It makes you wonder how things were kept relatively peaceful in Mr. Trump's first term. There was something of a trade war. There will have been this kind of dynamic at play. Yeah, and in the first term, China learned painfully that Donald Trump is a very different kind of world leader. In fact, I was told by someone well-placed in Washington at the very beginning of the first term that Donald Trump was picking up the phone and calling Xi Jinping so often to ask for help over North Korea that finally the Chinese sent envoys to Washington to deliver a message, which was, we will pick up the phone if it's the American president, but he's not our North Korean desk officer.

7:19Can we let some underlings handle this? They just find it incredibly difficult that Donald Trump wants to do everything one-to-one at the top. And so what does that clash mean now? If the actual nuts and bolts of trade can't be worked out in part because of what amounts to cultural differences, what breaks the impasse? I mean, I think that's what's so dangerous for the world economy because this level of tariffs is so damaging to global confidence, to global markets, is so disruptive that you would want it normally to go away as quickly as possible. You would want the number one priority to be for the two sides to sort out a deal.

7:54But there is a tremendous incentive on the Chinese side to say, we are not going to get involved in these factional arguments where every day you turn on the TV, a different cabinet secretary on Trump's side has a different explanation for what these tariffs are meant to do. Are they meant to move factories forever from China to America? Or is this an invitation to do a deal and make the tariffs go away? Those clashing messages, China wants no part of that. And so they have a strong incentive, if they're just interested in protecting their guy, Xi Jinping, to actually let this roll out for three or six months and see where America's arguments finally settle down.

8:32But in the meantime, does the world economy have three to six months to wait with this level of paralysis in the US-China trade relationship? But is it completely paralysis? In other sectors, in other ways, we're seeing the world rebalancing in the face of this Trumpian uncertainty. Surely China is thinking the same thing as regards its supply chains and its customers. I mean, if you put giant rocks in a river, the water will flow somewhere else. And there is an enormous torrent of Chinese goods that have to go somewhere. So this is both an opportunity and a real headache for the Chinese. The opportunity is political.

9:08You see Xi Jinping going around Southeast Asia on a long planned tour of countries that do a lot of trade with China already. And he has a message. And you will not be astonished to hear that that message is, we are reliable, we are predictable, we believe in globalization, unlike the awful Americans. So we should pal up together and defend the current order. But the problem is that those same trade partners, they're also frightened of the sheer size of China's economy and frightened about what happens if some of the ships that were heading to America turn around and head towards their economy.

9:44And that's not just true of Asian neighbours, it's certainly true of the Europeans. There's$500 billion worth of Chinese trade that used to go to America and is currently walled off by Trump's tariffs. If that ends up in other economies, that is going to be unbelievably disruptive. So China is very, very large and very, very strong and has a story to tell. But it's also very, very scary to a lot of the people hearing that kind of pitch to be friends. David, thanks as ever for joining us. Thank you.

10:31A couple of weeks ago, I was in Mallorca, one of Spain's Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean. Hannah Vioque writes about migration. Spanish territories line the sea route migrants often take from Africa to Europe.

10:52Mudu told me he first arrived on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, by boats from Senegal in 2021. He now lives in the Balearic Islands, and we crossed paths near Palmas Cathedral.

11:11People often die on these voyages, he told me. Fortunately, none did on his. But the journey has become increasingly dangerous. Dozens of bodies wash up every year on Spain's beaches. And one of the gruesome problems this causes is that Spanish borgs are becoming overwhelmed. Hannah, you say more and more people are making the crossings and more and more are dying. What sort of numbers are we talking about here? So last year, a record number of people arrived at Spain's shores, over 60 ,000. And that also means that the number of people dying on the journey is increasing, According to statistics from the Camino de Fronteras NGO, it's about 30 people per day, which totals over 10 ,000 deaths last year.

11:57And you say that these bodies are piling up in Spanish morgues. Tell me what's happening. So essentially the latest government statistics show that about 76 % of all migrants that make the journey to Spain arrive at the Canary Islands. But these islands aren't exactly equipped to manage the high volume of bodies that wash up ashore. In early January, actually, in a single incident, more than 50 people died. So these small islands are feeling the pressure. It's revealed deficiencies at several levels at these institutes of legal medicine, as they're called. There's a lack of personnel. There's also major delays with judicial authorizations.

12:35This is because an unidentified body is under judicial authority. So a judge has to approve its burial or its transfer. Once the autopsy is done, you really can't do anything with the body apart from storing it until you get that approval. And what this causes is bodies pile up and they wallow in this bureaucratic purgatory for weeks or months. And this even leads to public health concerns because they are decomposing, you know, they're picked up from the sea. So that process has already started. And there are reports of the smell of decomposing bodies filtering throughout a building. Sounds absolutely horrific.

13:14You've spoken to some of the people dealing with these bodies. What did they say about it? Yes, so I spoke to Ramon Llorente, who's the only forensic doctor on the small island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands.

13:33Ramon told me about a time where three bodies appeared all of a sudden and he only has space for two. There's essentially a cold chamber for two bodies. And there's just no protocol to deal with these sort of catastrophes or extreme circumstances that they have today. In that case, what he did was he put three bodies in this two-space chamber. And he told me that they only fit because they arrived in parts. One of the temporary solutions that he has found, at least, is to transfer bodies over to larger islands that have what are called catastrophe chambers. So they fit more bodies. Places like Tenerife.

14:09but again this is a temporary self and it actually ends up overburdening these other centers which has been a problem so Tenerife also complains of a lack of space constantly last year it accumulated 54 bodies all of its chambers were at capacity they were piling up bodies on top of each other they had to use the autopsy tables as well for storage and again it doesn't exactly solve the problem. Las Palmas, which is another large island, also had issues. There's a report that called it a real jam of corpses. And how is anyone trying to deal with this jam of corpses? Well, I think the obvious solution would actually be to ensure that less people have to make these journeys and risk death.

14:54But at a local level, it really depends on the island. There's no one authority that deals with everything. I spoke to Borja Moreno, who is the head of the Institute for Legal Medicine in Ceuta, a North African islet. And they don't even have a coal chamber there. This is something that he complained about because a lot of people do try to attempt the crossing from Ceuta to Spain. They swim that crossing and many end up drowning. He does take these bodies in and what happens is he has to bury them immediately. Then other places like El Hierro, which is another small island in the Canary Islands, they've invested in a coal chamber that was at port so that these bodies can be immediately stored.

15:39They also try to use funeral houses, but even there I've been told that resources are stretched to their limit. Over in Ana Dulcea, which is in the south of Spain, the regional government enacted a new protocol in September, which is meant to be a speedier process and it was suggested that all regions should follow this. It dictates that forensic doctors should collect DNA evidence within 48 hours so that judges can quickly approve burials or transfers. The issue is that a lot of places are already doing this. They don't have an option. They have had to bury bodies quickly and there is also a major trade-off when it comes to the moral issues of having to bury someone in an unmarked grave, knowing that their families are out there looking for them.

16:27And presumably that just increases the pressure on the few people who are dealing with these bodies. Yes, exactly. This is something that all the forensic doctors I spoke to mentioned, this sort of moral weight that carries throughout their work. Also, quicker burials make work harder for NGOs, like the International Center for Identifying Missing Migrants, once a body is buried, it becomes extremely hard to get that exhumed, to be able to identify the body later on. Not only does it require more bureaucratic wrangling, it's also a violation of Islamic law, and many migrants that do make this crossing are Muslim.

17:07So what ends up happening is that a lot of these bodies end up just being unidentified.

17:17Borja Moreno in Ceuta says the situation cannot be normalized. He told me if he were to emigrate and die somewhere, he would want his body to be stored and returned to his mother.

17:32As bad as the situation is now, the issue is becoming worse. The seas are getting warmer and numbers tend to increase during the summer months. So the future, sadly, looks quite grim. The work for forensic doctors is only getting more difficult. Hannah, thank you so much for talking to me about this. No, thank you.

18:16I recently visited an arcade called Atomic Pinball. It's in downtown Wood River, Illinois, which is about a half an hour away from St. Louis. I was there to cover a pinball tournament. John Fasman is our senior culture correspondent. The arcade itself is two huge rooms just filled with pinball machines lining every wall. As someone who's played pinball off and on for 40 years, I was kind of in heaven. There's a lot of things about pinball. There's a lot of variety in every machine, and every machine you play is different, so there's new challenges to learn for every game. Carlton Plurid is one of the younger players I met at the tournament.

18:56He came to the game pretty recently, and like a lot of us, just fell into an obsession with it. You've got to learn the baseline for every game before you can really compete on it at a high level, because if someone knows what to start and you don't, then you're going to be in trouble. A game I keep coming back to is Godzilla. There's a lot of depth to it, and I feel more immersed in the game than other ones, where it feels like I'm really battling the kaijus and destroying the cities. It's funny, when most people think of pinball, they probably imagine an old, unloved machine starved of coins and gathering dust in the back of a pizza parlor or a bar.

19:33But tournaments like the Winter Bash show otherwise. Competitive pinball is part of a broader revival of the game. The number of people playing in tournaments more than doubled between 2015 and 2024, from 16 ,500 to almost 40 ,000. And the firms making pinball machines have also grown. At the beginning of the century, there was just one company, Stern Pinball, left standing. There are now about 20 of various sizes around the world. And it's great to see that after decades of being intimidated and threatened by video games, pinball manufacturers have learned how to compete with them.

20:11So the game of pinball itself evolved from a 17th century French game called Bagatelle, in which players poke balls toward holes using sticks. American firms mechanized the game of pinball in the 1930s. They covered the play field with glass, as you usually see it now. They added bumpers, and they required coins to play, which was really the genius innovation. The other genius innovation is that in 1947, Gottlieb, who is a pinball-making monster company that doesn't exist anymore, they introduced flippers to one of their games, and that lets players keep the ball in action, and it lets them play longer.

20:47It's not just a game of chance with flippers. It became a game of skill.

20:55Even so, in the 1940s, a number of cities banned the game of pinball. In my hometown of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia, who was then the mayor, thought the game led to juvenile delinquency. He thought kids were spending their lunch money playing pinball instead of buying food. And he also worried about the game's ties to organized crime. And it was actually illegal in New York until 1976. There was a famous incident in which Roger Sharp, who was a pinball player, testified before the New York City Council, and he called his shots. To prove it was not a game of chance, it was a game of skill, he would tell the council where he was going to shoot the ball, and then he'd shoot it there.

21:29And that led to a sort of revision of pinball. It eventually became popular again and you could see it popping up in bars, pizza parlors, places like that. I love pinball. I've been playing an off and on for a long time. To me, it has a tactility and an excitement that video games just can't match. There's a heft to it. There's a physicality to it. That to me is really enticing.

21:56To most people, including, I'm ashamed to say myself, pinball is still sort of a game of chance and reaction. You know, you send a ball careening up, and as it comes down, you sort of flail with the flippers to try to keep the game going longer. But players who are really good never flail. They plan, they think, and they strategize. My goal is just, you know, shoot the castle, get the ball back under control. It's all about planning where the ball is going to go. I think that might be the main difference. Keith Elwin is the 31st best pinball player in the world at the moment, and he doesn't just play the games, he designs them too.

22:34He's made six of them. I've been playing since I was a little kid, and I've always wanted to design games, so I just started making my own game, and then Stern saw it, and was like, hey, come work for us. Pretty easy. For those of us who haven't designed games, how do you start? I mean, I play pinball avocationally. I like it. But I look at the game, and I don't know how to get from an idea in your head to something in front of you. So what's the process like for you? It sucks. You have all these ideas, and you're like, well, you can't fit them in the little physical space. I'm just going to make a fun shooting game, and then we'll see what toys we can jam where.

23:12But everything's been different so far. The game is really changing with the times. Pinball machines, you would once have to go out to find them and put coins in them to play them. They were mainstays of bars and pizza parlors. Today, Stern Pinball's CEO told me that 70 % of his machines are played at home. And the way that games are constructed are also changing. Pinball machines these days have microprocessors in them. They are networked so you can challenge a player on the same game anywhere else in the world. And they're structured like video games, too. They have levels. You advance through them.

23:47You're doing quests. It's still a fairly niche game. Last year, I think about 3 billion people played a video game. A much smaller fraction than that played pinball. But for those who love it, they really love it. And the number of players keeps growing. And, you know, I asked Keith when I was at the tournament, what is it that appeals to you about pinball? And he said something that I think a lot of people who play can relate to. He said, you'll have to ask the eight-year-old me. There's just something about it. and that I think captures the wonder and the nostalgia of the game that keeps people coming back

24:35that's all for this episode of the intelligence we'll see you back here tomorrow

24:43Thank you.