Drum Tower: Xi’s doomed economic plan

**David Rennie** (0:00)
Hello, David here. You're listening to a free episode of Drum Tower.
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**David Rennie** (0:54)
The Economist. Xi Jinping gave an unusual audience to top American business leaders.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:13)
Companies like Blackstone, FedEx and Qualcomm are all represented at the meeting.

**David Rennie** (1:19)
The message here is that China welcomes foreign business.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:23)
Now, this was a very important geopolitical meeting with China trying to turn sentiments in its favor.

**David Rennie** (1:30)
Does that mean that U.S.-China relations are looking up?
One year ago, Drum Tower sat down with The Economist's editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, to talk about U.S.-China relations. Zanny had just been in China for the first time since the pandemic. And back then, in spring 2023, ties between America and China seemed stuck in a downward spiral.

**Zanny Minton Beddoes** (1:54)
If we manage in the coming years to avoid an outright conflict between these two countries, that for me is going to be a measure of success.

**David Rennie** (2:03)
Today, there are still many sources of tension. But has that sense of acute crisis ebbed? I'm David Rennie, The Economist, Beijing Bureau Chief. My co-host Alice is away this week. So I'll be speaking to our editor-in-chief Zanny, who's just back from China. We'll hear her sense of the mood in Beijing and of China's place in the world.
This is Drum Tower from The Economist.
Zanny, welcome back to Drum Tower.

**Zanny Minton Beddoes** (2:40)
It's great to be here.

**David Rennie** (2:42)
Since you spoke to us last year, Zanny, you've been podcasting and talking to a lot of people. You interviewed a Hamas leader, you went back to Ukraine, and now you've just been with us in Beijing for a week for the China Development Forum, where senior Chinese politicians meet with foreign business bosses and officials.

**Zanny Minton Beddoes** (3:00)
I have, David, and I have to say that my March week in China is right up there now amongst my highlights of the year.
And it's not just that the China Development Forum, which is a remarkable and absolutely kind of anthropologically fascinating gathering, where you have a bunch of Western CEOs on their best behavior, sitting in rows, listening to long speeches by Chinese officials. So that's a really fascinating thing to watch. But perhaps even better for me is that my March visit is my kind of Rennie tour of Beijing week, which has two components. Firstly, it's a complete stamina test.
I think, David, I added it up and we had about 30 meetings. You'd scheduled breakfasts, lunches, coffees, dinners.
I left Beijing, my waistline thicker, and my mind filled with an amazing sense of what's going on in China. And it was wonderful for me to get a sense of just what an extraordinary job you do there.

**David Rennie** (3:49)
Well, you're too kind. And your office told me to keep you busy. So that was all I was trying to do.
And I like to thank the CDF, that forum that you went to, for keeping me in my place, because as a local grubby reporter, I got, I think it was a purple badge, which there was a sort of series of endless humiliations of doors I couldn't go through that you could. And then I had lunch in the staff canteen in this sort of basement with a plastic tray, which actually I have to say pretty good. But you were off eating, I think it was abalone with the swells, I believe.

**Zanny Minton Beddoes** (4:20)
You know what? All of these gatherings, whether it's the World Economic Forum or indeed the China Development Forum, they all have various sets of badges. It's a bit like middle school, you know, you always feel that there's something more interesting going on where you are not. But I can assure you that the food was no better because I happened to go to the ordinary lunchroom and then I went to the VIP lunchroom and I found out that the food was exactly the same in both.