Asia Communique: Xi Heads to Pyongyang, Trump Eyes Taipei, and Huawei Takes Nvidia's Lunch
Your daily briefing on geopolitical developments across the Indo-Pacific
Hello Readers,
A lot happened in Asia in the last 24 hours, and most of it connects. Xi Jinping is preparing to travel to Pyongyang, extending a diplomatic hand to Kim Jong Un days after shaking Trump's in Beijing. Trump, returning from that same summit, says he will call Taiwan's president, a move that would shatter nearly five decades of protocol and test just how durable any understanding he reached with Xi actually is.
Meanwhile, Jensen Huang is in damage-control mode, conceding that Huawei has largely taken Nvidia's place in the world's second-largest economy while insisting the door is not yet closed. Taken together, today's stories are less a set of isolated developments than a single, sprawling argument about who gets to set the rules in Asia and who is being left out of the room where those rules are made.
Xi Eyes Pyongyang: Beijing’s Korean Gambit
Chinese President Xi Jinping may visit North Korea as early as next week, according to South Korean officials cited by Yonhap, one of the most consequential diplomatic signals on the Korean Peninsula in years. The timing is deliberate: it follows Xi’s summit with President Trump in Beijing last week, where both leaders affirmed a “shared goal to denuclearize North Korea” in language notable for its vagueness and absence of any enforcement mechanism.
The groundwork was laid in April, when Foreign Minister Wang Yi traveled to Pyongyang and met Kim Jong Un directly, an unusually elevated encounter, while Chinese advance teams have since conducted protocol preparations in the North Korean capital. A state visit now would formalize what Beijing has been quietly constructing: a position as the indispensable broker between Washington and Pyongyang, allowing Xi to extract concessions from both sides while controlling the pace of any diplomatic opening.
Seoul have responded with careful diplomatic language, calling on China to “play a constructive role” on the Peninsula, barely concealing its unease that a Beijing-mediated track could route Korean Peninsula diplomacy entirely around South Korea. For the Trump administration, hungry for a foreign policy headline on North Korea’s nuclear program, the arrangement may prove difficult to resist. That is, of course, precisely why Beijing is offering it.
Trump and Lai: A Call That Would Break 47 Years of Protocol
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he would speak with Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te, a statement that, if followed through, would mark the first direct conversation between a sitting U.S. president and a Taiwanese leader since Washington switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979. The last time a U.S. leader publicly acknowledged speaking to Taiwan’s president was in December 2016, when Trump, then president-elect, accepted a congratulatory call from President Tsai Ing-wen, which itself was a break from four decades of protocol that prompted China to lodge a formal diplomatic protest and prompted Wang Yi to dismiss it as “a petty trick by Taiwan.” That was between a president-elect Trump and Tsai. A sitting president calling Lai would be a categorically different, and far more consequential, provocation.
The timing and context are critical. Trump made the remark aboard Air Force One on the return flight from his Beijing summit with Xi, telling reporters he needed to speak to the person “running Taiwan” about arms sales. That framing is significant: presenting a call with Lai as transactional, centered around weapons procurement, provides Trump with diplomatic cover. The call is purely business, not a policy statement on Taiwan’s status. Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister welcomed the prospect, calling it “a very good and rare opportunity.” Lai, for his part, has said he would use any such conversation to tell Trump directly that China, not Taiwan, is the party undermining stability in the strait.
Beijing’s reaction will be the key variable. In 2016, China’s response was deliberately restrained; Xi was calculating and did not want to antagonise an incoming administration. The dynamic in 2026 is fundamentally different: Xi has just hosted Trump, secured a joint denuclearization pledge on North Korea, and extracted at least implicit U.S. caution on Taiwan independence from the Beijing summit communique. A Trump–Lai call now arrives as a direct challenge to whatever understanding the two leaders reached in Beijing, and China’s response this time is unlikely to be so measured. The question isn’t whether Beijing protests, but how loudly they do so, and whether Trump uses Lai as leverage or genuinely intends to recalibrate U.S.–Taiwan relations after a week of appearing to favor Xi.
Huang Concedes China, But Won’t Walk Away
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has acknowledged that the company has “largely conceded” China’s advanced AI chip market to Huawei, a striking admission that crystallizes the cost of two years of escalating U.S. export controls. Huawei’s Ascend 910B processors have become the de facto standard for Chinese AI firms cut off from Nvidia’s flagship hardware, with Huawei on track to capture the largest share of China’s AI chip market in 2026, its sales up at least 60 percent year on year.
Yet Huang is not retreating entirely. Speaking this week, he argued that China will eventually open its market to U.S. AI chips, framing it as an economic inevitability: “The Chinese government has to decide how much of the local market it wants to protect and how much of the local market it wants to expand with more AI capacity.” Nvidia is also pursuing a license to resume sales of its H20 chip, a scaled-down GPU designed specifically for the Chinese market, and has received signals from Washington that approvals could follow.
The broader warning buried in Huang’s remarks deserves more attention than it has received. He has long cautioned that ceding the Chinese market does not simply cost Nvidia revenue; it actively cultivates a Huawei capable of exporting its AI stack globally, replicating China’s Belt and Road infrastructure model in the technology domain. Washington appears to be slowly recalibrating, but the market share Nvidia have surrendered in the interim may prove very difficult to claw back.
Thank you!