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Trump’s State Visit To Beijing And The New Cold War On Asia
By Tings Chak
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Thurs. May 14, 2026: From Beijing this week, the first US state visit to China in nine years is being staged for the world to see. The Great Hall of the People is open to Donald Trump, who has traveled with eighteen US executives – Apple, Tesla, BlackRock, Boeing, and Nvidia among them. A state banquet on Thursday, followed by tea and lunch on Friday.
On the streets of Beijing, ‘the Beast‘ has been securing the motorcade route since last week, flown in by C-17 ahead of Trump’s arrival to meet with Chinese president Xi Jinping. The international mainstream press is calling this a thaw between Washington and Beijing. Trump’s actions seem to speak otherwise.
Encountering a Different China
The last US state visit to Chinese soil was Trump’s own, in November 2017 – at the start of the US-imposed trade war that would deepen under Biden and intensify in his second presidency. The China that received him then was still learning to respond to the aggressions. The China that receives him now has spent nine years diversifying its export markets, building supply chain autonomy, developing the technological leverage to push back, while turning towards Global South countries. Trump’s failed tariff war against China ended up hurting its own economy and people more than China’s, and Beijing’s export controls on rare earth elements ultimately forced Trump to back down. The eighteen US executives in the delegation, including Tim Cook, Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, have come because their companies cannot do without the Chinese market. The economic instruments of US containment have not produced the result Washington wanted.
The War on Iran
Since 28 February, the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran—which postponed this summit by six weeks – has killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and thousands of Iranian civilians. Meanwhile, more than 2,700 civilians have been killed in Lebanon, where US-Israeli strikes continue.
In retaliation against the US-Israeli aggression, Iranian missiles and drones have struck fifteen US military sites across Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – Al Udeid Air Base alone hit by 44 missiles and 8 drones, with 217 structures damaged or destroyed and an estimated $5 billion in repair costs. In its eleventh week, despite the US naval blockade and bombings, Iran has mounted sustained resistance and the war has not gone as Washington predicted. It has made unmistakable what anti-war movements across our region have long argued: the bases sold to host nations are not shields but targets.
In the days immediately before his arrival, Trump rejected Tehran’s peace proposal as ‘garbage‘. On 11 May – the eve of his departure – the US Treasury sanctioned twelve more individuals and companies over Iran-China oil trade, and the same day, a group of US senators urged Trump to approve a new $14 billion arms package for Taiwan.
Beijing has not been silent. On 2 May, in answer to an earlier round of US sanctions on five Chinese refineries, China invoked its anti-sanctions Blocking Rules for the first time since their introduction in 2021: the US measures “shall not be recognized, enforced, or complied with” within Chinese territory. The Chinese Foreign Ministry called them illegal and unilateral, without basis in international law. Though the defiance was not unconditional – Chinese banks have been quietly advised to limit exposure to the sanctioned refiners—the public position is clear. In the same week, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi received Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi in Beijing. China remains Iran’s largest trading partner and the principal buyer of its oil.
An Architecture of Containment
Iran is not the only war backdrop. Across the region, the architecture of US military presence is being expanded and accelerated. The same week of Trump’s visit, the largest joint military exercises in Philippine history concluded – Balikatan 2026, with seventeen thousand foreign troops from seven nations, Japanese anti-ship missiles positioned on Filipino soil, and a new US fuel depot in the south of the country. In central Luzon, the Philippines has granted 4,000 acres in New Clark City to the Pax Silica Initiative—a US-controlled high-tech zone operating under US common law and granted diplomatic immunity, on a lease renewable for 99 years.
On 28 April, the commander of US Forces in Korea, General Xavier Brunson, told the Japan Times that Washington is building a ‘kill web‘—a networked system fusing Korea, Japan and the Philippines into a single architecture against China, Russia and North Korea. In August 2025, Trump told reporters of the US base at Pyeongtaek that he would like to “get ownership of the land where we have a massive military base” in South Korea, a country where the US has 66 military bases. In Japan, military spending is being doubled – the largest rearmament since 1945 – with 400 US Tomahawk missiles purchased, a project that has continued and accelerated under right-wing Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. For Taiwan, Trump authorized $11 billion in arms in December, the largest package in history, and has told the press he intends to discuss arms sales—with Xi himself.
From Hyperimperialism to Hands off Asia
What is on display in Beijing this week is not a thaw, and the executives traveling with Trump are not a sign of moderation. The economic and military aggression against China are two halves of the same project of containment. This is hyperimperialism: an empire turning increasingly to force as its economic dominance erodes, with China and other Global South countries defending their sovereignty as the primary targets. Trump’s transactional style is not a departure from US imperialism but the form it takes when its economic instruments no longer deliver.
The Hands Off Asia campaign, launched on 30 April—the anniversary of the liberation of Vietnam—by the International People’s Assembly and partner organizations across our region, calls for the removal of foreign military bases from Asia, the cancellation of aggressive pacts like AUKUS and the Quad, and the redirection of military spending towards the needs of our peoples. The architecture being expanded across our region was not built to protect the people but to encircle China and discipline the rest of Asia. As Trump arrives in Beijing this week, no deal signed at the Great Hall will hide what his administration is building across our region—and the peoples of those places, from Okinawa to Subic, from Pyeongtaek to Tehran, see this war-mongering for what it is and oppose it, calling for: Hands off Asia.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was produced by Globetrotter. Tings Chak is the Asia co-coordinator of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and co-editor of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought. She is based in Beijing.
Source: Globetrotter
The British Empire They Carried: The Fractured Identity Of Britain’s Caribbean Generation
By Nyan Reynolds
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Weds. May 13, 2026: There are elderly men and women throughout the Caribbean today who grew up saluting the British flag, singing “God Save the Queen,” learning British history in school, and pledging allegiance to a Crown that once claimed them as its own. Many of them are now in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, yet few fully understand that at one point in history, they were legally tied to the British Empire as nationals of the United Kingdom and Colonies. Even fewer understand what happened to that identity after independence arrived across the Caribbean.
Recently, I began asking older Caribbean people a simple question:
“Did you know that before independence, you were legally connected to Britain as a colonial national?”
Most looked confused.
Citizen Of The United Kingdom And Colonies
Some had never heard the term “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies,” commonly referred to as CUKC. Others assumed that because Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and other Caribbean nations later became independent, whatever relationship existed before simply disappeared without consequence. A few believed they were always only Jamaican, Trinidadian, or Barbadian. Yet history tells a far more complicated story.
For generations born under British colonial rule, identity was never as simple as geography. A child born in Jamaica in 1957 was not born into the same constitutional reality as a child born in Jamaica in 1970. One was born into the British Empire. The other was born into an independent nation. That distinction matters because law shapes identity, and identity often survives long after laws change.
Before Jamaica gained independence in 1962, it was a British colony. The same was true for many Caribbean territories that existed under British control for centuries. People born in these colonies were classified under British nationality law as British subjects and later as Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies following the British Nationality Act of 1948. Their nationality did not come from words printed on a birth certificate. It came from the legal structure governing the colony itself.
In practical terms, this meant that many Caribbean people born before independence were legally tied to Britain. They were part of an imperial system that viewed the colonies not as foreign lands, but as extensions of British rule. This reality shaped every aspect of life. Children attended schools that centered on British history and British values. They learned about British monarchs, wars, literature, and patriotism. Portraits of the Queen hung in classrooms. The Union Jack represented authority and national belonging. The British Empire was not presented as distant. It was presented as home.
This is one of the most overlooked psychological consequences of colonialism.
Colonial education did not merely teach subjects. It taught identity. It cultivated loyalty to the empire and produced generations who were conditioned to see Britain as the political and cultural center of their world. Many Caribbean people grew up knowing more about English kings and queens than they knew about African civilizations, Caribbean resistance movements, or their own ancestral histories. Their worldview was filtered through the lens of empire.
INDEPENDENCE
Then independence arrived.
For countries like Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados, independence represented liberation, dignity, and self-determination. These nations could finally govern themselves without direct colonial oversight. Flags changed. Constitutions changed. Political power shifted into local hands. Across the Caribbean, independence was celebrated as the birth of a new national consciousness.
Yet, beneath the celebration lay another reality rarely discussed.
A generation of people who had spent their entire lives being shaped as colonial subjects suddenly found themselves politically reclassified. The imperial identity they inherited no longer carried the same meaning it once had. Many transitioned from being legally connected to Britain to being citizens of newly independent Caribbean nations almost overnight. The empire that once claimed them was shrinking, and as it shrank, so too did the meaning of imperial citizenship.
This created a profound contradiction.
How do you spend your childhood singing “God Save the Queen,” pledging loyalty to Britain, and learning that you belong to an empire, only to later discover that the relationship was politically temporary?
How does a person emotionally process the idea that they were once considered part of Britain, only to later become categorized as separate from it?
For many Caribbean people, these questions were never clearly explained. Life simply moved forward. Nations became independent, passports changed, and new national identities emerged. Yet the emotional and psychological transition was far more complicated than the constitutional transition.
The law changed quickly. Identity did not.
This fracture became even more visible during the Windrush era. Thousands of Caribbean people migrated to Britain after World War II to help rebuild the country. Britain faced labor shortages in transportation, healthcare, manufacturing, and public services. Caribbean migrants answered the call because many believed they were traveling not to a foreign country, but to what they had been taught was the “mother country.”
Some arrived holding British passports. Many had every reason to believe they belonged there legally and culturally. They worked in hospitals, factories, railways, and transit systems. They paid taxes, raised families, and helped shape modern Britain itself.
Yet decades later, many members of the Windrush generation found themselves questioned, detained, denied healthcare, denied employment, and even threatened with deportation because they could not produce paperwork proving rights they once assumed were unquestionable. The Windrush scandal exposed a painful truth about empire: people who were once welcomed as imperial citizens later became treated as immigrants whose belonging could be challenged.
That contradiction still echoes across the Caribbean diaspora today.
Many elderly Caribbean people do not fully know the legal history of their former status within the empire. They remember the flag. They remember the songs. They remember the schools and the rituals of British colonial life. But few were taught how dramatically their political identity shifted after independence. Some still carry an emotional attachment to Britain while simultaneously identifying deeply with their Caribbean nationhood. Others reject colonial identity altogether because of the harm colonialism inflicted upon the region.
The result is a layered identity that cannot be reduced to a single label.
ANCESTRY
Many Caribbean people are African by ancestry, Caribbean by culture, British by colonial formation, and part of a wider Black Atlantic experience shaped by slavery, migration, empire, and resistance. The modern world prefers clean national categories such as citizen, immigrant, foreigner, or national. But the empire created identities far more complex than modern immigration systems are comfortable admitting.
This is why history matters.
Not because people want to remain trapped in the past, but because the people who lived this history are still alive. There are senior citizens walking throughout Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and the broader Caribbean who were born into one constitutional reality and aged into another. Some never understood the transition. Some never questioned it. Some are only now realizing that the empire they pledged loyalty to once considered them part of itself.
Their story deserves to be told because identity is not merely paperwork. It is memory. It is education. It is belonging. It is the stories nations tell people about who they are.
The Caribbean carries deep scars from colonialism, but it also carries forgotten truths. One of those truths is that there exists a generation whose lives were shaped by an empire that later redrew the boundaries of belonging around them. They were taught to see Britain as home while simultaneously being kept at the edges of it. They inherited an identity that dissolved politically even while its psychological imprint remained.
And perhaps the greatest tragedy is not simply that this happened, but that so many people who lived through it were never fully told the story of who they once were.