Reflections on 国家发展改革委有关负责同志就《关于发展新质生产力的意见》答记者问 [A Responsible Official of the National Development and Reform Commission Answers Reporters' Questions on the Opinions on Developing New Quality Productive Forces]--Reading a Responsible Official: New Quality Productive Forces, the Third Plenum, and the Languages of Chinese Modernization

 

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中文版本请见此处

 Versión en español AQUÍ

On 9 October 2026 the NDRC published, through its Department of High Technology, an interview in which a "responsible official" answered reporters' questions on the Opinions on Developing New Quality Productive Forces (NDRC 2026). At first glance the text is modest, a ministerial explainer of the kind issued after major policy documents. It may be worth suggesting, however, that the modesty of the genre is part of what makes it worth studying. Texts of this kind sit where authoritative doctrine passes into administrative instruction, and in a Leninist system it is perhaps at that point of passage that small choices of wording carry the most weight.

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This essay considers that document in its ideological environment. It begins from a premise that may seem unusual for a policy text: that a Chinese Leninist text is best read with the attention to exact wording usually given to legal or sacred texts. The reason is not that each word is fixed in meaning. It is rather that the system communicates through a web of formulas (tifa), reused across documents and over time, sometimes with the same meaning and sometimes with meanings that shift. Such texts have been described as reproducing one another "in the style of self-referencing mimesis," so that "they all reproduce each other but neither is exactly a mirror image of the other" (Backer 2024b). If that is right, meaning is to be sought in the small space between repetition and variation.

This essay, then, offers a close reading of a short and apparently routine text. On 9 October 2026 the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) published an interview in which an unnamed "responsible official" answered reporters' questions on the Opinions on Developing New Quality Productive Forces, issued jointly by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council (NDRC 2026). The essay proceeds on the premise that texts of this kind, produced within a Chinese Leninist practice of authoritative interpretation, may reward the attention to wording usually reserved for statutes or sacred texts. Its argument is that meaning is to be found in the web of formulas the interview shares with the texts above it, and in the small shifts it makes within that web.

The essay pursues three questions. The first is what the official said, with attention to the formulas (tifa) through which the interview speaks and to the ways their usage has held steady or shifted over time. The second is how the interview aligns with, extends, narrows, or quietly reworks the Third Plenum documents of July 2024 that place new quality productive forces near the centre of New Era economic doctrine: the Decision, the Communiqué, and Xi Jinping's Explanation of the Decision (CPC Central Committee 2024a; 2024b; Xi 2024). The third is how this hierarchy of texts might be read within the cognitive and meta-institutional structures of Chinese Marxist-Leninist modernization, as distinct from the frameworks of development and modernization in global discourse (Backer 2026).

Throughout, the essay distinguishes between texts constructed for internal and for external consumption. The internal voice is the language of modernization through new quality productive forces, addressed to cadres and, through mass-line study materials, to the public (Guangming Daily Research Team 2024). The external voice is tied more closely to what might be called New Era Communist internationalism, running from Xi's 2019 call at the G20 for a "high-quality world economy" (Xi 2019) to the architecture of a "community with a shared future for mankind" and its four global initiatives (Parton 2026). The interview suggests that the internal voice has become more defensive and more disciplinary, while the external voice remains universalizing. Read with Robert Cover's account of nomos and narrative (Backer 2022), the distance between them may be understood as the distance between a narrative that has its own means of enforcement at home and one still seeking them abroad. The essay claims to reconstruct the structure of official meaning, not to verify how policy works in practice, and offers its conclusions with that limit in view.

 

Prepared with Gok

CfP: Global China Pulse 1/2027: China’s Science Silk Road and the New Geopolitics of Knowledge Production

 

 I am delighted to pass along the call for papers for a future issue in China Global Pulse developed around the theme: China’s Science Silk Road and the New Geopolitics of Knowledge Production. The details of the CfP follows below.

Global China Pulse (GCP) is a biannual Open Access journal that focuses on China’s international engagements in their various manifestations. Launched in 2022 as a spin-off of The People’s Map of Global China and as a sister publication of the Made in China Journal, GCP aims to provide scholars and practitioners conducting grounded research on China’s global footprint with a platform to publish content in diverse styles and experiment with various approaches and formats. GCP rests on two pillars: the conviction that today more than ever it is necessary to bridge the gap between the scholarly community, civil society, and the public; and the related belief that Open Access is essential to ethically reappropriate academic research from commercial publishers who restrict the free circulation of ideas. The journal is published by the Global China Lab, a non-profit organisation founded by some members of our editorial board with the aim of advancing open knowledge about China.

 

 

Comunicado conjunto sobre la situación en Cuba Brasil, España y México [Joint Statement on the Situation in Cuba] Issued by the La IV Cumbre en Defensa de la Democracia [IV Summit in Defense of Democracy] Barcelona el 16-17 Abril

 

 VERSION en Español Aquí

 

The leaders of the governments of Spain, Mexico and Brazil issued the following communication during the course of their  IV Cumbre en Defensa de la Democracia [IV Summit in Defense of Democracy] which was held in Barcelona 16-17April 2026. The Communication, On the situation in Cuba, follows reports that the President of Mexico was seeking to develop a common position.

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Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced Saturday during the IV Summit in Defense of Democracy in Barcelona that she will propose a formal declaration opposing any military intervention in Cuba, urging dialogue and peace to prevail over confrontation amid U.S. threats and energy blockade. “To this day, speaking of that small Caribbean island, we believe that no people are small, but rather great and stoic when defending their sovereignty and the right to a fulfilling life,” she added. Speaking at the opening of the gathering convened by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Sheinbaum made her call before a dozen progressive leaders including the presidents of Colombia, South Africa, and Uruguay

 The Mexican president used her address to reaffirm that her country’s constitutional foreign policy principles remain fully relevant in the current global landscape. She cited non-intervention, respect for self-determination, peaceful dispute resolution, rejection of force, legal equality among states, and the enduring pursuit of peace as pillars of Mexico’s diplomatic identity. She warned against any definition of freedom that implies submission to external interests or reduces sovereign nations to the status of modern colonies, insisting that liberty holds no meaning without social justice, sovereignty, and the dignity of peoples. (here)

The language does not deviate form a position that the Mexicans have taken from the start of the current crisis in Cuba, its elements already part of discourse of President Sheinbaum in the wake of the U.S. action in Venezuela at the start of 2026. The three elements are (1) the centrality of humanitarian aid and the minimization of popular suffering, (2) sovereign equality and territorial integrity; and (3) respect for human rights, multilateralism within the context of the UN system, and respectful dialog.

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The three elements, interestingly enough are shared  by the United States. The problem, of course, is that the meaning that these common principles and the text used to express them of the terms and the values with which they are invested separate the United States from Mexico, Spain and Brasil  as much as the common text appears to join them in a common project. The United States  centers humanitarian aid on direct aid to the people of Cuba administered through non-governmental organizations, and has made efforts in that respect; traditional Latin American institutionalist cognitive premises would  assess and operationalize that aid through State organs and make an effort not to be too judgy about efficiencies or strategic choices respecting distribution (a problem repeated elsewhere, e.g., in MENA and Africa). The United States is also positive about sovereign equality and territorial integrity; that focus is shaped by the transactionalism of the America First Initiative, Both share a strong distaste for territorial ambitions (with some exceptions. . . there are always exceptions). Transactionalists, however, accept the premise that projections, including violent projections into another State may be necessary,  and advantageous, within the ambit of their reading of the "rules" of internal law frameworks. Institutionalists tend to see no difference between outward projections of power into another state and territorial stress--whether it is freely roaming over the skies of a state (Iran, Lebanon, etc. as part of efforts to  negotiate substantially important changes in relations where there is no innocence on  the part of the state onto which such power is projected strategically) or projecting military power to extract persons (in the case if Venezuela  characterized as part of a criminal gang by the projecting state) and a Russian style invasion if another country for the purpose of annexing territory.  The last, of course is the most problematic for the U.S. in the sense that it is intended by the old institutionalist order. The US understanding of multilateralism as inter-governmentalism is ironically closer to the traditional Brazilian and Chinese position than that of the old US elites or that of Mexico and Spain--except as seen in the communication as discourse. 

More generally, the terms that form the core of the communication themselves  are not just larded with ambiguity, their precision depends in large part on the orienting cognitive premises within which it is possible to develop communal agreement as the the values inherent in those terms and the intentions that they embody where a state seeks to rely in their meaning to act or refrain from acting.   And of course, the nature of those terms is distinctly meaningful in the Global South, especially in Latin America, in ways that may not resonate either the US or China; except as  perhaps as text. Those differences were nicely elaborated in the speech of President Sheinbaum before the Summit leaders, the video of which may be accessed below the image that follows.

Pix and video posted to YouTube HERE

 

At its core, then, the text of the communication invites its reader to embrace a community of meaning and meaning making that permits only one orthodox reading of its sense of itself, and only one orthodox application of its pronouncements--without the bother of exposing those premises or debating their form and interpretation. That is fair; it is also politics; and it goes to the broader and much more important contest of the control of any sort of collective meaning and from leaning expectations of behavior, and which is acknowledged, is only visible in the margins and between the lines of text. That contest, in turn, in its current form, has a very very long history; and the likelihood of its decisive resolution is fantasy (though one that helps fuel the intensity of belief necessary to manage and deploy the foot soldiers of each of these camps).  For all that it is still important. It us important for the way it suggests a perhaps substantial difference in ordering premises between the Global South in Latin America (built on the richness of its own experiences and desires as they perceive them, or at least as their elites perceive them) and those of the United States and China. The latter two increasingly align though from fundamentally different starting points, and that alignment increasingly marks a gap between the Latin American South and the two apex powers. 

None of this, of course, will have a substantial effect on the resolution of the Cuban crisis; and that suggests that even substantial and fundamental differences in the way in which  the ordering if reality as a function of premises and values will be softened by pragmatism. In that it is telling that Mexico has been leading this endeavor, continuing to play a discursive and normative long game beyond Cuba even as it bends to the realities of the situation in which it finds itself in this stage of the region's historical development (consider remarks of President Sheinbaum Cumbre en Defensa de la Democracia: Presidenta propone programa global de reforestación y declaración contra intervención militar en Cuba). But it is a pragmatism that, for their own reasons cannot be shared by the current leaders of Spain and Brazil, each of which has their own and quite distinct (and not irrational) agendas and historical baggage. And here, the discourse of international law and humanitarian intervention, garnished with the tropes of sovereign equality and territorial integrity within dense normative frameworks of multilateral constraints that are meant to have supra-constitutional (and thus legal) effect (of some kind) will have to confront a perhaps equally interesting problem of the management of systems of collectivized States (whether from an transactional or institutional structural framework)--the problem of failed states and the duties of either the collective of states (however organized and conceived) or of some of their elements, to take responsibility (whatever that means). It is in this latter respect that much of the discourse speaks to, if only obliquely--and that, of course is the fundamental problem. It is a critical ideological and cognitive problem for the governments of Mexico, Spain, and Brasil precisely because, to some greater or lesser extent,   any admission respecting State failure in Cuba would  (or could) weaken the normative power of the ideologies that are both shared among them and central to the advancing of their own normative orthodoxies both within their own countries and as the orthodox foundation of international ordering. To protect Cuba against its failures of its own government is, in that respect and to some extent, a protection of their own normative legitimacy. Or so they might be inclined to think. . . (Cf., here, here, and here especially from the Cuban side).  

All the same, through the transactional lens of the US, to which much of this is directed, the discursive performance will  have consequences for the relations between these four states in ways that are not yet clear--except that relations between the US and Spain and Brazil are likely to get worse before they get better (absent a change of government); those with Mexico will remain pragmatic and transactional, and it is likely that it will be Mexico that will be most effective in serving as  an intermediary and bridge to other states. And those changes will substantially affect relations with both Europe, but more importantly China, as perhaps the current government of Spain has sought to demonstrate, inadvertently of course, as it seeks to live the values of its government. In that latter case it may be worth considering the parallelism between the maverick politics of Mr. Orban in Hungary and that of Mr. Sanchez in Spain (Move Over, Hungary: Spain Is China’s New Best Friend in the EU). If they are mimetic, that points both to its importance, as well as its longevity where either is out of sync with larger and more powerful cognitive movements among the organs of collectivized states.  

The text of the Communication follows below.  

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Collaboration in Partnership with the African Telecommunications Union: Africa Technology Policy Tracker

 

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The  Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Collaboration in Partnership with the African Telecommunications Union have created the Africa Technology Policy Tracker.  This is described as the "first ever continent-wide aggregate of digital economy laws, policies and regulations in Africa" (here).

AfTech is a research and policy tool that advances evidence-based policymaking in Africa’s rapidly evolving digital economy by providing a one-stop repository of national and continental technology frameworks. By cataloging policies across key pillars like digital infrastructure, platforms, skills, and innovation, AfTech makes it easy to explore, compare, and analyze policy actions shaping the continent’s digital future. AfTech offers valuable insights into the diverse approaches countries are taking toward digital governance. Our aim is to enhance visibility on the burgeoning digital policy environment in Africa and for AfTech to become an essential resource that informs decisionmaking, fosters cross-border collaboration, and helps guide the continent toward a more integrated and resilient digital economy. (here).

The focus is on development. This aligns both with the Chinese focus on socialist modernization with atonality characteristics organized around its global programs (the genesis of which was the Belt & Road Initiative) and the America First focus on development through bilateral transactions in markets that expand both production and capacity n home and host states. 

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 The spreadsheet of laws and regulations may be download HERE. 

Jane Munga has also prepared an accompanying policy brief: Africa’s Digital Infrastructure Imperative. The Introduction and "Key Takeaways" follows below.

“一国两制”下香港维护国家安全的实践 [The Practice of Safeguarding National Security in Hong Kong Under "One Country, Two Systems" February 13, 2026, 22:42]

 

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In May 2020, as the Hong Kong National Security Law was being revealed, I noted its foundations and consequences:

It is the voices of those who will stay, rather than the others, that perhaps ought to be given greater weight by those with the power to make decisions about the issues. The voices of those that will stay ought to be reassured, they are told, by the marginal effect, the intended national security measures, will have on them. “A new national security law tailor-made for Hong Kong will only target “a small group of people” to plug a legal loophole exposed by violent anti-government protests in the city and will not affect the livelihood of ordinary citizens, Vice-Premier Han Zheng has assured local deputies to Beijing’s top advisory body.”11
And, indeed, the national security law draft fits nicely into the response developed by the central authorities since the start of the protests in June 2019, that sought to develop a taxonomy of Hong Kong people distinguishing between those who were committed to Hong Kong on its terms, and everyone else. National security offers a deeply developed taxonomic base founded on important notions of patriotism. And patriotism, in turn, could be managed in a way that welcomes patriots into the nation under the protection of the national security law, excludes others, and manages the rest as foreigners whose protection is dependent on the state of relations between state officials and their correspondents abroad.  (Larry Catá Backer, Hong Kong Between One Country and Two Systems: Essays on the Year that Transformed the Hong Kong SAR 2019-2020 (2021), p. 325 quoting in part Natalie Wong , Gary Cheung and Lilian Cheng, “Two Sessions 2020: Hong Kong national security law will only target ‘small group of people’, Vice-Premier Han Zheng says as Beijing hits back at critics,” South China Morning Post 23 May 2020)).

 Over the last half decade or so, the implications of this start, the elaboration of this framework, has become as clear, and as clearly directed, as one might have seen coming in 2020.  One measure of that trajectory, in its pacing and directing, might be gleaned by the Chinese State Cοuncil's periodic White Papers on Hong Kong.  These are foreigner-facing performances, or perhaps announcements, projected outward from China and directed onto the global stage, with special focus toward foreigners and their elites, some of whom may still harbor an eagerness to "re-boot" their discourse around the special status of Hong Kong in international space, one that cane too late in the end. On 10 February 2026, the Chinese State Council announced (in English) the release of its latest White Paper on Hong Kong: China releases white paper on Hong Kong's efforts in safeguarding national security under One Country, Two Systems framework. It sought to summarize the text of the much longer White Paper (in English as Hong Kong: Safeguarding China's National Security Under the Framework of One Country, Two Systems; in Chinese “一国两制”下香港维护国家安全的实践 ; from the website of the Chinese Embassy to the United States). 

And, indeed, the struggle against foreign interference and what the Chinese authorities see as an unrelenting effort to detach Hong Kong from the rest of the nation, that produced both the 2026 White Paper and the need and justification for the National Security Law. Thus the White Paper Preface notes: 

Since its return to China, the goal of the central government and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) has always been to develop a stable and prosperous Hong Kong, but our effort has been obstructed and undermined by anti-China agitators in Hong Kong and hostile external forces, who have employed all possible means in their attempt to turn Hong Kong into an independent or semi-independent political entity, severely challenging the One Country, Two Systems principle. The struggle to safeguard national security in Hong Kong is persistent. (Preface)

Nonetheless there is a positive as well as defensive objective. National Security  frameworks  are not just produced to defend against foreigners but also to ensure domestic prosperity. The White Paper's Preface explains the reasons for its publication: "The Chinese government is publishing this white paper to review Hong Kong's endeavors in safeguarding national security and the experience and insights gained in the process, and also to clear up confusion and misunderstandings surrounding the issue to build consensus, and to ensure the high-quality development of the policy of One Country, Two Systems with high-standard security." To these ends the White Paper is divided into five sections: I. An Unrelenting Fight for Safeguarding National Security in Hong Kong; II. The Central Government's Fundamental Responsibility for National Security Matters Concerning Hong Kong; III. The HKSAR's Achievements in Fulfilling Its Constitutional Responsibility for Safeguarding National Security: IV. Hong Kong: From Disorder to Stability and Prosperity; and V. Creating High-Standard Security for High-Quality Development of the One Country, Two Systems Policy.

The Summary in the Press Release, which will likely be what most people read (rather than the 18 page White Paper itself), and thus serve as its authoritative reductive element (and the elements that Chinese officials might wish emphasized) described its thrust this way:

Consisting of five parts in addition to a preface and a conclusion, the white paper details the unrelenting fight for safeguarding national security in Hong Kong and the central government's fundamental responsibility for national security matters concerning Hong Kong.  It also expounds on the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR)'s achievements in fulfilling its constitutional responsibility for safeguarding national security, Hong Kong's transition from disorder to stability and prosperity, and efforts in creating high-standard security for high-quality development of the One Country, Two Systems policy. (China releases white paper on Hong Kong's efforts in safeguarding national security under One Country, Two Systems framework)

These, of course, served as the central themes of Chinese discourse developed to a fine point during and around the unrest in Hong Kong in 2019-2020 until COVID-19 rather than its own forces, intervened in  sort of miraculous way, to collapse the unrest and to provide another means of developing measures for managing large bodies of a population. 

The principal element, and one central to the structuring  of the cognitive ordering of reality for officials is the fundamental tension between order and prosperity, on the one hand, and chaos and disorder on the other. Embedded within that are the foundational driving force of the principles now built into socialist modernization memorialized in the 3rd and 4th Plenum of the 20th CPC Congress. These were themes discursively foregrounded by the Chinese General Secretary of the CPC by the end of 2019 in the context of the Hong Kong protests, and they have served in more generalized form since then. And, of course, the foundational understanding of One Country Two Systems as focused on economic rather than political variation (see essays in Hong Kong Between One Country and Two Systems). Much of this tends to be discounted outside of China, producing the sort of distorted and fantasy analysis that, through a pragmatic lens (anyway) does few much good (however that concept is measured or understood).  

And then, the White Paper picks up and elaborates the fundamental element of People's Democratic Dictatorship (Mao Zedong, On the Peoples Democratic Dictatorship (1949)), through the discourse of ruling through a patriotic front, a state of governance with respect to the fulfillment of which a National Security Law is a necessary element. 

The white paper says that the central government has applied a holistic approach to national security, and effectively exercised overall jurisdiction over the HKSAR in accordance with the country's Constitution and the HKSAR's Basic Law. It has enacted the Law on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region -- which has been enforced in the region -- and ensured that Hong Kong is administered by patriots. The central government supports the HKSAR in fulfilling its constitutional responsibility to safeguard national security by effectively preventing, halting, and punishing any activities that endanger national security, according to the white paper. (China releases white paper on Hong Kong's efforts in safeguarding national security under One Country, Two Systems framework).

The HKSAR is administered; it is administered by patriots. Patriotic elements become the core of democratic elements, as democracy is practiced within China, though with some variation given the historical context of Hong Kong and the goal of integration by the 2040s--endogenous and consultative, with an element of electoral functions in the constitution of its legislative organs (“Whole Process People’s Democracy” (全过程人民民主) as Applied Constitutionalism: Linking People to Governing Institutions through Socialist Constitutional Democracy and Leninist Political Parties). This is the core element of the White Paper's Section IV (Hong Kong: From Disorder to Stability and Prosperity).

The contemporary development, probably the more significant part of the White Paper beyond the affirmation of the discursive and operational framework for HKSAR developed in 2019-202, is its incorporation into the trajectories and expectations , as well as the analytical lens, of socialist modernization in China's New Era of historical development. That is a topic taken up in the White Paper's Section V. Nonetheless, that embedding has a quite distinctive Hong Kong element that is worth  foregrounding.

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Security is a prerequisite for development, and development provides a guarantee for security. A firm commitment is required to both safeguard security and advance development. Hong Kong's unique status and strengths have formed through development, and their consolidation and improvement will also be achieved through it. * * * Under the new circumstances, a dynamic balance between development and security should be achieved so that the two reinforce each other. Innovation should be promoted while risks are prevented. Hong Kong's unique status and strengths should be consolidated and boosted, and new driving forces for development should be continuously strengthened. Greater attention should be given to security in unconventional areas such as finance, shipping, trade, and the protection of overseas interests. Intervention and sabotage by hostile external forces must be guarded against, and the systems and mechanisms for countering foreign sanctions, intervention, and long-arm jurisdiction should be further improved. Risk monitoring and early warning systems should be improved to effectively defuse major risks, so as to achieve high-quality economic development and maintain social stability in Hong Kong. White Paper: Creating High-Standard Security for High-Quality Development of the One Country, Two Systems Policy).

This concept now appears not just in the context of Hong Kong but generally within emerging trade and investment regimes elsewhere. National Security has, indeed, become the critical element of global relations for some of the principal trading regions. Consider the U.S. version:

Together with the National Security Strategy of the United States for 2025 (November 2025) (discussed here: America First as the Essence of National Security and the American Post-Colonial 'Howl': Reflections on the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States (2025)) and the U.S. Department of State Agency Strategic Plan Fiscal Years 2026-2030 (January 2026) discussed here: Reflections on the Normative-Institutional Architecture of America First: U.S. State Department "Agency Strategic Plan: Fiscal Years 2026-2030, the 2026 National Defense Strategy rounds out the elaboration of the America First basic political line of the Republic when it comes to the role and focus of the Republic's external relations with its (re) focus on the general contradiction of the Republic in its "new era of historical development" from the now foundational orienting lens of the protection and elaboration of a transactional ordering framework--the fundamental need of ensuring peace (the territorial space of a transactional universe projected outward and directed inward) for the appropriate forward movement along the path to the realization of the Republic's rebirth in its new golden age. (Fleshing Out the America First Framework as Peace Through Strength Projections: Brief Reflections on the 2026 National Defense Strategy (US Department of War January 2026))

Where does that leave us? The White Paper emphasizes the critical element of national security at the core of national development. It suggests that socialist modernization, even in its HKSAR variations, cannot be achieved except as a function of national security. And it suggests that national security is not possible without socialist modernization. What one now encounters is the emergence of the national security State of which China provides one, but by no lams the only, variation on this theme for the constitution of political economic systems form the 3rd decade of the 21st century. 

 

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The Press Release (English), and the Chinese and English Text of the White Paper follow below.

王毅出席联合国人权理事会第六十一届会议高级别会议 [Wang Yi Attends High-Level Meeting of the 61st Session of the UN Human Rights Council]

 

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 The UN's Human Rights Council continues to provide a space within which China can advance its construction of a global human rights framework with Chinese characteristics. To that tend Wang Yi, member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Foreign Minister, attended  a meeting of the 61st Session of the HRC and discussed China's global human rights principles, which were made available to a Chinese audience in the People's Daily, 王毅出席联合国人权理事会第六十一届会议高级别会议 [Wang Yi Attends High-Level Meeting of the 61st Session of the UN Human Rights Council].

While there is nothing new here, repetition is its own virtue and in this case also provides the virtue of an essentialization of the Chinese framework.

一要奉行主权平等，守护全球人权治理初心。必须坚持各国平等参与、平等决策、平等受益，推动建设公正合理包容的全球人权治理体系。二要遵守国际法治，筑牢全球人权治理根基。各国应共同维护不干涉别国内政这一“黄金法则”，对以人权名义操弄双重标准的言行坚决说不。三要践行多边主义，破解全球人权治理挑战。各国应推动摒弃各种形式的殖民主义、种族歧视，妥善应对人工智能、气候变化与人权等新的课题。四要倡导以人为本，充实全球人权治理内涵。要将发展权置于多边人权议程更加突出位置，让人权进步可视可感可及。五要注重行动导向，提升全球人权治理效能。中国愿同国际社会协调行动，共同描绘全球人权事业新图景。

First, we must uphold sovereign equality and safeguard the original aspiration of global human rights governance. We must adhere to the principles of equal participation, equal decision-making, and equal benefits for all countries, and promote the construction of a just, reasonable, and inclusive global human rights governance system. Second, we must abide by international rule of law and consolidate the foundation of global human rights governance. All countries should jointly uphold the "golden rule" of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and resolutely say no to words and deeds that manipulate double standards in the name of human rights. Third, we must practice multilateralism and address the challenges of global human rights governance. All countries should promote the abandonment of all forms of colonialism and racial discrimination, and properly address new challenges such as artificial intelligence, climate change, and human rights. Fourth, we must advocate a people-centered approach and enrich the content of global human rights governance. The right to development should be placed in a more prominent position on the multilateral human rights agenda, making human rights progress visible, tangible, and accessible. Fifth, we must focus on action and enhance the effectiveness of global human rights governance. China is willing to coordinate actions with the international community to jointly create a new landscape for the global human rights cause. (王毅出席联合国人权理事会第六十一届会议高级别会议)

There is a lot packed in here in a very small textual space.  Nonetheless several core structuring principles can be identified. The first is sovereign equality as a basis for human rights governance.  That suggests a close connection between state prerogative and human rights as a supra-national construct. That is made clear by the second principle that imports the notions of sovereign non-interference into the governance of human rights by states.  The third grounds multi-lateral human rights governance on concepts of colonialism and race discrimination--both are relics, in a sense of the old 3rd World movement now modernized to apply to current challenges. But at their core they again deal with issues o sovereign inequality, and sovereign protection against interference bu other sovereigns as the essence of human rights colonialism (which is characterized as a bad thing). The fourth then centers development as the gateway human right, grounded in the sense of an inmate connection between development (modernization) and human rights progress that enhances the fundamental objectives of human rights governance in sovereign equality non-interference and ant-colonialism at a state to state level. The last focuses on human rights governance as producing something measurable by reference to the ordering principles that foreground human rights governance and that governance, in turn, as a function of modernization with national characteristics but in dialog with other states.. 

The People's Daily reporting follow in full below.  The full text of the address (Remarks by H.E. Wang Yi at the High-Level Segment of the 61st Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council) also follows below in the official English version.

CFP--"China, the United States, and the Future of the Global South: Competing Visions, Converging Interests": 6th International Conference on China and the United States in Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia

 

I am delighted to share this call for paper for the 6th International Conference on China and the United States in Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, for which I serve on the organizing committee. The theme for the 6th Conference is China, the United States, and the Future of the Global South: Competing Visions, Converging Interests. The Conference takes place May 14-15, 2026 at Turan University, Almaty, Kazakhstan.

About the Conference

China, the United States, and the Future of the Global South: Competing Visions, Converging Interests

China’s expanding presence across Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia is reshaping the political, economic, and security landscapes of the twenty-first century. Through initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China has invested heavily in infrastructure, trade, and development partnerships that have redefined connectivity between Asia, Europe, and Africa. At the same time, the United States continues to play a decisive role in these same regions through its network of alliances, defense cooperation, development aid, and strategic competition with Beijing. While some analysts frame these developments as part of a “new Cold War,” others view them as opportunities for renewed dialogue, cooperation, and inclusive growth across the Global South.

This conference seeks to move beyond binary narratives of rivalry and dominance. Instead, it will explore the intersections, overlaps, and tensions between Chinese and American strategies and the ways in which regional actors exercise their own agency in navigating these global transformations. From the energy corridors of Central Asia to the maritime routes of the Indian Ocean, and from technological innovation in the Gulf to political realignments in Africa, these dynamics reveal a world increasingly defined by multipolar interdependence rather than simple polarization.

Participants will examine the strategic, economic, and normative dimensions of global engagement. Key themes include infrastructure and connectivity, digital and green transitions, regional security architectures, development financing, and soft power. The goal is not merely to assess competition but to highlight spaces of cooperation and mutual learning that can contribute to sustainable and equitable development across the Global South.

The conference aims to bring together a diverse community of scholars, policymakers, and graduate students from different world regions and disciplines — including international relations, political economy, sociology, area studies, and security studies. Through panels, roundtables, and keynote discussions, participants will engage in evidence-based dialogue on both global strategies and local realities. Particular attention will be given to how states and societies in Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia interpret and respond to the evolving U.S.–China dynamic, crafting hybrid policies that reflect their own national priorities, identities, and developmental aspirations.

Rather than portraying the Global South as a passive arena of great-power competition, the conference emphasizes its active and strategic role in shaping the future of global order. Regional actors — from Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia and Indonesia — are increasingly defining new models of partnership that balance external ties with internal modernization. These emerging approaches challenge traditional hierarchies of global governance and call for rethinking development paradigms in light of local agency and regional innovation.

Ultimately, this event offers a platform for constructive, pluralistic, and forward-looking discussion on the evolving relationship between China, the United States, and the Global South. It encourages participants to envision a more inclusive global dialogue — one grounded in respect for diversity, sensitivity to context, and shared responsibility for peace and development. By bridging academic research with policy engagement, the conference aspires to generate fresh insights into how cooperation, competition, and co-evolution can coexist in an increasingly interconnected world.

More information follows below

 

“Between the Eagle, the Bear, and the Dragon: Canadian Business and Human Rights Through the Lens of National Security;” Remarks delivered at the Canadian Forum for Business and Human Rights Inaugural Conference, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, 14 November 2025.

 

I was delighted to have been asked to join a group of brilliant scholars at the Canadian Forum for Business and Human Rights Inaugural Conference, “Corporate Accountability in Canada: At the Crossroads of Scholarship, Legislation, Litigation, Policy-making, and Community Resistance.”The conference. I was organized by Dr. Akinwumi Ogunranti, an assistant professor and business advisor for the University of Manitoba Faculty of Law’s Marcel A. Desautels Centre for Private Enterprise and the Law, in collaboration with Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law Marine and Environmental Law Institute, and the University of Essex’s Human Rights Research and Education Centre. 

My presentation is entitled “Between the Eagle, the Bear, and the Dragon: Canadian Business and Human Rights Through the Lens of National Security;” Remarks delivered at the Canadian Forum for Business and Human Rights Inaugural Conference, “Corporate Accountability in Canada: At the Crossroads of Scholarship, Legislation, Litigation, Policy-making, and Community Resistance.” University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, 14 November 2025.

My remarks are perhaps descriptively summarized this way:

The current framework of the business and human rights projects, and with it sustainability and climate change related norms and objectives, were envisioned and elaborated at a time when national security, and waivers from general law/norm structures were increasingly viewed as obsolete and narrowly applied. Over the last decade, however, national security has become an increasingly potent concept in the business and human rights/sustainability context. To some extent it is being driven by the United States and the People’s Republic of China, each of which, from vastly different starting points, have developed structures of national security regimes trough which human rights and sustainability are realized. Europeans have also begun to attend again to national security, but with greater wariness. Canada occupies a space between these regulatory powers. Canada must both navigate around these developing frameworks while advancing its own national vision and priorities. These remarks will focus on two points. The first is the way that these national security regimes might impact Canadian firms inside and outside of Canada. Second, it will consider the Canadian national security landscape as it might begin to affect business and human rights along with sustainability efforts.

There is more here than that, of course. The remarks suggest the broad outlines of the revolutions in social organization and the way it expresses the realities it is is meant to shape as well as express. Choosing the starting point of normative structures substantially shapes the world around it. What is that starting point? States have already chosen: human rights or national security.  But even these are avatars of more fundamentally determining premises around which it is possible to order the reality within which ideas are normalized and values based "decision-making" may be undertaken as if it was to be assessed against unmovable "truths." Human rights becomes code for a cluster of ordering premises that are grounded on a global convergence based imperative that is framed around the ordering of relations  from out of the state to all of the subjects of its power, bit now undertaken as a contextually relevant pass through of norm making generated at the international level. It serves as a living souvenir of what was thought to be natural and permanent condition of human collective reality before COVID. National security, on the other hand, serves as code for the fracture of this global ordering by shifting the ordering premise from human rights (how ever conceived). It orders the world by reference to the needs and solidarity of human collectives organized in and through states. It seeks to protect and advance that collective both within its territories through development and contextually driven collective self-actualization and beyond their territories by protecting national productive forces, including the value of its normative constructs. States that embed human rights through a national security lens see the world quite differently than those who embed national security through a human rights lens. Reality expressed in  the authority of values, norms, and pathways to engaging with "stimuli" then follows.  The United States and China are brothers in arms on this point, though they adopt quite different approaches in defense of their respective political-economic models. Europe stands at the other end; or it did before the start of the 2nd phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And Canada, like many states in the Global South, inhabit the middle--using both lenses to mediate their relationships with apex States, and in the process transforming national security and human rights into instruments of national autonomy and protection against the giants which cannot be avoided. Human rights and national security, in that context are no longer themselves, but become instruments toward other ends.

The text of the Remarks follow below along with the accompanying PowerPoint. ACCESS EXTENDED REMARKS HERE: Backer_REMARKS_V2.0__CFBHRconference_2025; ; ACCESS PPT HERE: Backer_CanadaBHR_PPT

 

 

"Internationalism in Multiple Tracks: The UN Binding Treaty on Business and Human Rights Between the EU, China, and the U.S.," Remarks to be Delivered at the ESIL International Business and Human Rights Interest Group Workshop, Berlin 11 September 2025

 

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 The European Society of International Law (ESIL) is holding its 20th annual Conference next week at the Freie Universität (Boltzmannstr. 3, 14195 Berlin). The conference theme this year is ‘Reconstructing International Law.’

For the last decade, international law has gone through a period of turbulence. In response, it is time to move beyond crisis narratives and adopt a forward-looking approach. For such an undertaking, the year 2025 offers an appropriate context. It will mark the 80th birthday of the United Nations, the institutional centre of the international legal order. At the same time, 2025 is just five years away from 2030 when the future direction of the current blueprint for global social order, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), will need to be decided. (20th annual Conference).

In the context of the 20th ESIL Annual Conference, ESIL Interest Groups are holding pre-conference workshops on Wednesday 10 and Thursday 11 September 2025.

This year the International Business and Human Rights Interest Group will hold its annual workshop with the ESIL conference related theme: Reconstructing International Law: Structural Shifts Under the UN Binding Treaty on Business and Human Rights. The Workshop Overview explains the scope of the theme:

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Aligned with the theme of the ESIL Conference, ‘Reconstructing International Law’, this workshop examines the potential of the UN Treaty on Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Respect to Human Rights to reshape the relationship between international business and human rights. The treaty seeks to go beyond the voluntary framework of the 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights by introducing binding corporate accountability mechanisms. This entails changes to the architecture of International Business and Human Rights Law (IBHRL), with potential spillover effects on other branches of international law.

I was delighted to be participating in this workshop, speaking on the panel "Geopolitical Repositioning and Conceptual Transformations in International Law (The UN Treaty among global powers and shifts in legal thinking).

The title of my remarks is Internationalism in Multiple Tracks: The UN Binding Treaty on Business and Human Rights Between the EU, China, and the U.S. in the 2nd Quarter of the 21st Century.  The remarks can be roughly summarized as follows:

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Since its creation in 2014, and within the constraints of its Human Rights Council mandate, an “Open-ended intergovernmental working group” (OEIGWG) has sought to finalize the text of an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises. Recently the rough consensus that made that mandate and this project plausible appears to be shifting, or fracturing as the political and normative landscape within which it is being completed changes dramatically. This presentation considers the environment in which the OEIGWG’s treaty making project is now operating, and with it, the prospects for the instrument after it is presented to the international community. One starts with the treaty project itself—its mandate and work to date. One then considers the environment in which it must now navigate. For purposes of analysis these may be divided into three broad competing visions for international law and function in the human rights and sustainability of economic activity: (1) techno-bureaucratic (or administrative) compliance internationalism; (2) socialist internationalism; and (3) markets driven sanctions-security internationalist regimes. Each reconstructs international law and ordering in their own image; and each image produces potentially substantial areas of incompatibility around which a treaty project must now navigate if it is to acquire a substance beyond an allegiance to its text. At the same time each would reconstruct the treaty text to suit its own normative approach, the outlines of which serve as the end of the analysis.

ACCESS REMARKS HERE: BACKER_ESIL_IBHRIREMARKS_v3_2025; 

ACCESS PPT HERE: ACCESS PPT HERE: ESIL_2025_IGBHR_BACKER.

 

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"President Trump is the President of Peace" Reflections on the Power of Presidential Self-Revolution (自我革命), the Republic's Social Revolution (社会革命) and the Presidential Message: "President Trump Brokers Another Historic Peace Deal"

 

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Chinese New Era Theory stresses the critical importance of self-revolution for the sort of social revolution that carries a political collective forward ( Social Revolution (社会革命) as Self-Revolution (自我革命) and the New Quality Production of CPC Modernization: 习近平 深入推进党的自我革命 [Xi Jinping, Deepen the Party's Self-Revolution] (Part of a speech at the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Commission for Discipline Inspection on January 8, 2024)). Of course, one does not have to embrace Chinese Marxist-Leninist theory to apply context relevant trajectories of self-revolution and social revolution.

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 One of the most interesting journeys of self-revolution, and with it of the social revolution that follows in its wake within liberal democratic lebenswelt, has been that of the Trump Administration, with Donald Trump at its core. That progression can be measured from self-constitution of the Administration as it progressed along its development pathways from the start of resident Trump's first term (2016-2020) and the first several hundred days of President Trump's second term. At the center of this self-revolution is the (re)constitution of the President as a positive force for peace. This idea--and the chronicling of its actualization--has been nicely framed for the Republic in a recent Media Release from the Trump Administration--President Trump Brokers Another Historic Peace Deal (accessed via this link and also following in full below). The specific context is the final resolution of the current round of violence between Armenia and Azerbaijan (my interview on that situation here). But it is clear that the President's message meant to draw clearly both lessons and principles that could be shared with the Republic's masses at home, and the Republic's friends, competitors and adversaries abroad.  

We now understand that “President Trump is the President of Peace." (President Trump Brokers Another Historic Peace Deal). It ought to follow that the Republic is now, collectively, a Republic of Peace--self-revolution ushers in a state of social revolution.  That, one might be excused for thinking, is the thrust of President Trump's message to the Republic. This is a message that has been underscored and elaborated by Secretary of State Rubio, whose discussion of the notion of peace, and states of peace brokered by a strong Republic reflects the more fundamental self-revolution of "transactional-merchant phenomenology and its understanding of peace as an essential element of something larger: "As they say in some movies--peace, like death, is not an end but a doorway. That acquires a quite interesting aspect in transactional spaces." (The Phenomenology of Peace and the Price of the Deal--Text of and Reflections on the Interview: Secretary of State Marco Rubio with Brian Kilmeade of Fox Radio).

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What, then, is peace?  Perhaps Secretary Marco Rubio describes it best under conditions of transaction framing merchant realities--peace is the absence of war. War is understood as violent conflict, one that either destroys valuable objects (infrastructure, productive capacity and the like), or human the consumption of whom is the essential element of the process of production (workers, family units, consumers,  and operators of economic, social, religious, and cultural productivity) and the object (collectively) of productivity (at its extreme here) and curated. Societal self-pleasuring is the ultimate aim--however that is defined and made suitable for the times; and self-pleasuring consists of the proper interaction of objects and people agreeably arranged  and ordered in ways that permit a movement toward the maximization of their own self-and social value and that of the collective. This comes in many flavors of course (and ideology provides one of several languages for constituting these "flavors" in form suitable for both consumption and framing the human condition).  But at its heart is the fundamental postulate--that without the end of destruction there can be no movement toward.

Nonetheless, peace is not its own object.  It is a state of (dis)engagement that permits the fundamental logic of the operation of self and social systems toward the realization of its apex goal and purpose--the regularization of spaces in which transactions may be undertaken for the further fulfillment of self and social revolution. It might be understood as movement toward development (or modernization, however these terms are understood) that improves (or in some systems perfects) things and conditions of life for individuals and collectives.  In other words, the object is not peace; the object is the achievement of a state of stable transactions--iterative, perhaps even purposeful beyond the value of the transaction--that then manifest desired states of being. Peace is the predicate condition for the merchant; and the merchant is the predicate actor in development (not either the functionary or the warrior); and the work of the merchant is essential for the operationalization of transactional frameworks deployed to whatever ends suits society engaged in its endless processes of self-actualization, and for some, the attainment of states of perfection (at least until they die and a new generation starts the process again). That provides the framing of reality that serves as the foundation of the peace mission of the Republic with the President at is core. 

With one exception--the merchants of violence, those whose highest purpose is to produce those objects essential for the maintained of peace through violence, or its potential. But that is a story for another day. 

For today; for today it is for us to contemplate the nature, function, and states of peace into which we are all traveling toward. . . . one way or another. Self-revolution and social revolution leads the Republic toward an embrace of the ordering principle that peace is a predicate to development; and that development is the foundation of transactional cultures in which individuals and collectives prosper, each in their own way--until the contradictions of transactions in context moves both back to not-peace.  That, in turn, sheds light on the ordering framework of the dialectics of the human condition: Conflict-peace-transactions-conflict-peace.  What is peace? Peace is truce; peace is a condition of managed conflict; peace is a state of ritualized engagement; peace is a temporal space and a platform.  Managing peace, not conflict, becomes the key--perhaps that is so. Conversely managing conflict, not peace, is the key of equal value. The temporal objectification of both makes it possible to better use them; perhaps that is also a possibility. I leave that to others. 

The text of President Trump Brokers Another Historic Peace Dealand merits study.

 

Reflections on "'Accelerating American Exports'--Remarks by Director Kratsios at the APEC Digital and AI Ministerial Meeting"

 

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Thanks to President Trump, American AI is open for business. "'Accelerating American AI Exports':  Remarks by Director Kratsios at the APEC Digital and AI Ministerial Meeting,"

 The U.S. Director of  Michael Kratsios, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has been quite busy of late selling the America First AI Initiative both at home and abroad  (my earlier reflections here: Liberal Democratic Leninism in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Tech Driven Social Progress: Remarks by Director Kratsios at the Endless Frontiers Retreat and "The Golden Age of American Innovation"; and  CSIS EVENT: Unpacking the White House AI Action Plan with OSTP Director Michael Kratsios; my reflections on the US AI Action plan here: "Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan" (July 2025)--A Reverie on Building and Racing on A.I.'s Structural "Fury Road". 

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Most of these efforts, as is to be expected, add layers of meaning on a core of desire/objectives, wrapped around a way of looking at the world that is then encoded into the action-operationalization systems put in place to move from the recognition/articulation of desire to its realization. That is both fair and necessary; intensely so in the face of competing efforts to code Lebenswelt premises (collective and self-evident or given premises shared by collectives around which meaning and reality is ordered) onto the architecture of the cognitive cages within which social collectives will contain (if they can) tech enhanced generative intelligence systems and especially their control of engagements with it. As is appropriate to the project of constructing reality from its simulacra--the dialectics of facticity and its physical mirror mediated through mutual analytic simulation  as a sort of phenomenology of reality--this Lebenswelt project (among all the others) is built an imaginary of fact/data. This facticity is itself a micro encoding on belief and supposition on the basic units (humans) around which a collective Lebenswelt can be built, and thus built made as invisible as the coding of the programming of generative analytics furthered by this project, one in which Jacob von Uexküll's notion of ‘Umwelt’ provides a useful analytical doorway.  And its building depends as much on unlearning as it does on learning. Encoding bias is the essence of both tech enhanced human activity as it is central to the constitution of the normative cages within which socially acceptable expectations can be plugged into systems for the management of humans and their systems. 

None of this, of course, can or ought to make the slightest difference to Director Kratsios. He is in the cage; he is not designing it or ought to be particularly interested in its composition, materials, structures, resilience, etc. Indeed, spending too much time on these meta-cognitive issues would prove both distracting and a threat to the objective--to take a vision of cognitive reality already shaped through its collective given and self evident premises, and to impose it on targeted collectives in ways that achieve desired objectives. It is only in this--from the bottom up conceptually, that Director Kratsios stands in any relation to the larger issues. He represents, in this sense an active Umwelt the actions of which contribute to and shape--solely by their iterative and aggregating action--the Lebenswelt in which it necessarily operates--both in its physical and simulated (virtual) aspects.  

With this as foundation, it is possible to extract something useful from Director Kratsio's remarks beyond the necessary word salad expected of political figures and officials tasked with "selling" idea--in this case a reality structure for coding of a certain sort and the platforms within which it is meant to operate. This has particular application to Director Kratsios' latest remarks:  "'Accelerating American AI Exports':  Remarks by Director Kratsios at the APEC Digital and AI Ministerial Meeting," the text of which, as prepared for delivery was posted to the White House Website on 5 August 2025 (and follows in full below) (Bloomberg Interview clip here). 

The object of the Remarks was to focus on one particular aspect of the AI Action Plan--a part of the AI Action Plan critically relevant to another Trump Administration Initiative, its America First Project (20 January 2025; "From this day forward, the foreign policy of the United States shall champion core American interests and always put America and American citizens first").  

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As you no doubt know, on July 23rd, just two weeks ago, the White House published the President’s AI Action Plan. The plan outlines America’s national effort to remain the leader in pioneering AI and to be the global partner of choice as this technology transforms industries and information flows around the world. The United States stands resolved to do all it can to accelerate AI innovation, to build out AI infrastructure, and to conduct AI diplomacy. President Trump began executing the AI Action plan immediately, signing three executive orders following his remarks on the occasion. These included an executive order preventing U.S. government procurement of ideologically biased AI models, an order providing resources for the rapid construction of data centers and power systems, and, finally, an order promoting the export of full-stack American AI technology packages to allies and partners worldwide. That is why I am here today. (Remarks )

From this opening Director Kratsios then elaborated a number of themes worth unpacking a little.

1. AI will be a powerful tool for bilateral diplomacy. The Remarks elaborate briefly the alignment of AI policy and the America First Initiative in the constitution of a system of deeply integrated win-win relationships in which States may engage in mutual beneficial transactions around a "quality product" which then will both tie States together in a transactional platform and enhance their interest, however these interests may be valued by the parties.

2. Place your Bets: The AI Space Race. A good chunk of the opening of the Remarks were devoted to painting a picture of the importance of the AI Initiative. That was undertaken by aligning it to the Space Race of the middle of the last century. 

[M]y colleague David Sacks, White House AI Czar, has described the president’s Action Plan remarks as the most significant technology speech since President John F. Kennedy told the nation that America had chosen to go to the Moon. History will prove Mr. Sacks right, I think. We know that here in 2025, we meet in a time much like the one President Kennedy described in 1962, “in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance.” Our challenge is to confront the changes promised by AI with strength on behalf of our fellow citizens, and our hope is that these technologies will be tools for the growth and exercise of knowledge, and not instruments of ignorance and fear. (Remarks ).

In a sense that is an apt analogy--certainly in its socio-political intensity. If technology is power, then technology, like power is both unavoidable, and the consequence of failing to exploit its potential to the fullest--come what may--will realign not just power relations but the cognitive cages through which power systems are arranged in hierarchies that tend to perpetuate dominance.  

3. Let's Make a Deal. Director Kratsios, however, did not project his image all the way to the meeting at which his remarks were delivered to make an historical analogy, or to consider the normative metaphysics of power in a tech fueled environment.  Rather, in his own words, "I am here to discuss not the technology that may arise tomorrow but the technology ready for application today. I come to you not to talk of the promise of potential future technologies but of economic partnerships and the mutual prosperity we can achieve now." (Remarks ). Metaphysics and historical analogy will sort themselves out well enough through a phenomenology of transaction--a way of approaching the organization of reality that is action oriented and determined to wrest meaning from the accumulation of action rather than wresting action as a function of the application of meaning. One focuses on the individual but one manages the individual within a predetermined deal space constructed out of expectations about the role of individuals, of markets, and of the state, especially where the state represents collective activity to their peers. 

With the AI Action Plan, the Trump Administration is getting the Federal government out of the way of America’s AI innovators, to create space for real competition and creativity, so that companies can create the kinds of products every type of consumer will find truly useful. This administration seeks to free the power of private industry to commercialize breakthrough technologies, prevent monopoly, and build the future. It believes that the broad overregulation of AI incentivizes centralization and censorship. (Remarks)

The State avoids regulation of the factors of production of AI; it oversees the process of transactions in AI of whatever it is that is built or offered for sale.  Whatever it is, it will be based on US tech, and that, itself, provides a powerful (trans)actional attachment between American producers and (foreign) consumers of tech.  

All of this has already been nicely explained by Director Kratsios in earlier remarks (Liberal Democratic Leninism in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Tech Driven Social Progress).  

4. The Deal-making Platform and the America First Tech Mass Line.  That alignment of technology and individual capacity, protected within the structures of the State, itself exhibits the core expectations of the America First Lebenswelt and its connection to the constellation of the Umwelt from out of which it arises and which it both serves and incarnates as a collective manifestation. 

 The Trump administration believes that by extending human capacities and complementing human work, AI already heralds a new industrial revolution, information revolution, and even cultural renaissance.* * * The true technological and new industrial revolution we look forward to today is not the frontier AI systems themselves, but what our peoples will do with them. AI applications as we experience them today already appear poised to be an enormous multiplier for improving our productivity * * *Where it takes us next, the Trump administration believes, is for inventors to show us, but we will labor to ensure that it betters the lives of all of our citizens. (Remarks ).

This system provides an efficient cage within which to realize its ambitions.  It builds an engine in which tech and ambition can be ignited to produce propulsion that takes the chassis of State in which it is placed in whatever direction it is meant to go--toward enhanced wealth and prosperity or towards some sort of apotheosis of human striving in others. 

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5. To enhance the dealmaking and innovation of individuals (Unwelten) within a State protective Lebenswelt. Director Kratsios then turns to the deal making. 

We are ready to make deals under the dealmaker in chief. As we speak, the clock is ticking as my office at the White House and the Secretary of State assist the Secretary of Commerce in establishing the American AI Exports Program, which will carry out the development and deployment of the U.S. AI stack, packaged for each customer nation’s convenience. * * *As needed, the United States is eager to employ all available U.S. Federal financial tools to support priority AI export packages. These include direct loans, loan guarantees, equity investments, co-financing, political risk insurance, credit guarantees, technical assistance, and feasibility studies. (Remarks )

Just as Foucault a generation ago could speak to the foundational impact of power/knowledge systems, so, it seems, the Trump Administration may speak to the power of market/State systems.  Markets may go where they like, but deals are protected, enhanced, and to some extent directed, by the State through the mechanisms of power. And here the object is to enhance dealmaking (Umwelt power relations in and as markets) to the ends of encoding U.S. tech among (State to State) partners in developing the lebens-platform that will constitute a marketplace where competing tech may find it harder to find a point of entry. It is only in this way that one can make sense of Director Kratsio's understanding that "With the AI Action Plan, the Trump Administration is getting the Federal government out of the way of America’s AI innovators, to create space for real competition and creativity, so that companies can create the kinds of products every type of consumer will find truly useful." That is true, but only within the platform that the U.S. creates and for the purpose (projection of US AI tech) it is instituted and subsidized.

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6. America First as a Global Warehouse Club Store. The result, as Director Kratsios suggests is savings and enhanced  ability to achieve local goals. But to enter one must become a member. Once one pays the price (encoding U.S. tech into the fabric of markets for and with tech), one can engage in whatever deal making suits. 

President Trump’s administration is unapologetically America First. We want what is best for the American people, above all. Fortunately, as AI transforms the future of global commerce it presents an opportunity for mutual benefit. We know you want what’s best for your country, too. With the AI export packages we are developing, we want you to have the AI sovereignty, data privacy, and technical customization that you so rightly demand on behalf of your peoples. We are committed to finding a way to enable America’s private companies to meet your national technological needs. (Remarks )

The system tolerates unequal valuation of transactions. One judges one's engagement in this tech warehouse club store solely from one's own perspective.  There is very little difference once one is in the American warehouse club store  between it and its rivals--particularly the EU's Brussels Effect Club and the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative Warehouse Store. The difference is the cost of membership, the limitations of shopping elsewhere, and the quality and availability of goods and services of interest to those willing to pay the membership fees and abide by the rules. That, perhaps, is the fundamental insight of what is emerging post-globalization within global ordering.  Everything else is of interest to public intellectuals and to those who would either destroy these emerging systems or shift them elsewhere--perhaps to local shopping districts. 

7. Normative quality assurance. Products will be attractive to buyers, especially if they commit to long term attachment, only if those products meet quality measures. With tech quality measures are as much normative as they are operational.  What Director Kratsios offers is American normative quality assurance--not with respect to the way that tech works, but with respect to the value enhancing factor in the operation of tech--data. 

I also want to reiterate the independence and privacy that can be expected from AI technologies and infrastructure that have been Made In America. There are features of the American character—our commitment to property rights, to freedom, yes, even to endless lawsuits—that stand guard against danger to your sovereignty. (Remarks )

That is a critical point worth savoring. When one buys or consumes tech one is also consuming the normative framework under which it was produced. That applies in equal measure to the tech on offer from the other greater powers--the E.U. and China.  For some states the American normative quality baseline may be less appealing than that proffered by China, or Europe.  But the reverse may be true. Not just tech, but norms also are for sale in this new era of the race for tech based dominance ("Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan" ).