There they go again! The editorial pages of the august New York Times once again has sent columnist Tom Friedman to China for a FULL week and once again he comes up with the most incredulous piece arguing that Donald Trump and Xi Jinping should sit down together and come up with a master framework for governing Artificial Intelligence, which is poised to transform the world.
The very notion that Xi could be trusted not to use any such conversation to steal further technological secrets is naive on the face of it. After all, his government has engaged in massive theft of American secrets, including designs for aircraft carriers, and penetrated America’s telecommunications systems. That gave him access to the email systems used by the U.S. Departments of State, Commerce and Treasury. Attack groups affiliated with Xi’s government monitored calls of political candidates in 2024. It sent a spy balloon over the United States that the Biden Administration insisted was not transmitting information back to China, but Newsweek magazine recently published a report that the balloon was jammed with American-made spying and communications equipment. Xi is using TikTok, DeepSeek and other algorithms to monitor the lives of millions of Americans.
So Trump just sits down with Xi and makes happy talk about a technology that has the potential to control the future of warfare? Fat chance. This piece follows a whole series of ridiculous puff pieces by opera singers, panda lovers and apologist Chinese intellectuals trying to pretend that the United States and China are not engaged in any kind of conflict. That editorial line of coverage flies completely in the face of what reporters like David Sanger and Chris Buckley are writing in the paper’s news columns, which are managed separately from the editorial pages. What are the editorial page editors smoking?
