Given the current geopolitical situation, there is a lot at stake with the upcoming summit between the United States and China scheduled in Beijing from May 14 to 15. The Independent Singapore gives you a rundown on what’s on the agenda, what the implications are for both superpowers and for the rest of the world, which country is at an advantage going in, and what a win would look like for both.
The summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping had originally been planned for late March or early April but was since delayed due to the war in the Middle East, which began on Feb 28 when the US and Israel started bombing Iran.
On March 26, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt announced the dates for Mr Trump’s “long-awaited meeting with President Xi in China.”
The US President, in turn, said in a social media post, “I look very much forward to spending time with President Xi in what will be, I am sure, a monumental event.”
What’s on the agenda
The top priority on the agenda is trade and economic stabilisation, with tariffs, trade imbalances, and industrial policy disputes expected to be up for discussion. Furthermore, there is also the possibility of China buying US goods such as Boeing aircraft and agricultural products, as well as talks on rare earth supply chains and export controls.
As can be expected, geopolitics and security will also be discussed, specifically the war in the Middle East, which is affecting practically every country, given the energy crisis and disruption to supply chains.
Importantly, analysts say that China’s role as a diplomatic intermediary could be part of the discussions.
Taiwan and security in Asia are also likely to be on the table, given the support that the US has extended to Taipei.
What’s at stake
Because the summit is between superpowers, the meeting between Messrs. Xi and Trump may have far-reaching implications.
On a global level, the summit may affect the stability between the world’s two largest economies as well as energy markets amid the Middle East conflict.
For the United States, what’s at stake is its management of inflation and supply chains. The US will want to avoid a trade crisis with China while it is at war against Iran, as well as maintain secure alliances in the region.
Meanwhile, for China, what is probably the most important is securing its energy flows and export markets. Additionally, with the US busy with the war in Iran, China may be looking to broaden its diplomatic influence.
What counts as a ‘win’ for each
A win for the United States would primarily be an economic one. Since the war began, economists have raised their risk assessments of a US contraction. China’s commitment to large-scale purchases of goods and progress on trade imbalance or market access would count as wins for Mr Trump.
If China cooperates with the US’s designs, or at least remains neutral on the Iran war, this will also be seen in a positive light.
A win for China would likewise be in terms of economic gains, such as reduced tariffs or fewer restrictions. If China can walk away with more stability without major concessions, this would also be a plus.
Moreover, a win for China would also look like the US recognising it as a key global mediator.
Who’s in a stronger position
Coming in, it appears that China may have a stronger hand to play, in no small part due to the goodwill the US has lost due to the Iran war.
Also, while the US is strategically stretched by the war, China has had a little more time to shape the agenda.
Nevertheless, both countries are likely to want to choose stability over confrontation, and if both sides can claim success in terms of trade purchases, confidence-building steps, even if major structural conflicts are left unresolved, the US and China can both walk away with some satisfaction. /TISG
Read also: Singaporeans expect China’s influence in Asia to surpass the United States: IPS Survey
This article (When superpowers meet: What’s at stake at the upcoming summit between the US and China) first appeared on The Independent Singapore News.
In this blog post, Maaike Matelski, Eva van Roekel and Htet Hlaing Win describe the strong reactions which the removal of Venezuelan President Maduro by the United States elicited from online audiences in Myanmar, who predominantly called for a similar intervention in their country.
On 3 January 2026, the United States carried out a military intervention on Venezuelan soil, abducting President Maduro and bringing him to the US to stand trial on drug-related charges. The invasion was widely condemned as violating international law and as an example of the imperialist mindset of US President Trump. Yet there were also celebrations among Venezuelan dissidents in exile, who had escaped Venezuela’s repressive environment and saw the forceful removal of Maduro as a possible way out for the country and its people. Inside Venezuela, both celebration and condemnation were largely muted, giving way instead to an atmosphere of suspended anticipation, as people grappled with uncertainty about what kind of future might now unfold in the absence of Maduro.
The invasion prompted widespread online reactions both across Latin America and the Caribbean and in other parts of the world, including Southeast Asia. Dissidents from Myanmar, facing repression for many decades and increasingly since the military coup of February 2021, wrote provocative statements on social media such as “Mr. Trump please also raid Myanmar” and “Hey Trump we have rare earth with genocidal regime.” While such social media comments should probably be taken with a pinch of salt, they do reveal a broader pattern: the tendency to reduce complex matters of human rights and global power relations to a simple depiction of good and evil. Based on our long-term engagement with Myanmar and Venezuela, we offer some critical observations on recent developments in both countries.
Both Myanmar and Venezuela have historically been underreported in international media, at least until recently. Despite their sizable populations and geopolitical importance, neither Myanmar nor Venezuela feature regularly in European reporting. This may partly be a matter of proximity but also opportunity to report, as repressive leaders in Myanmar and Venezuela have heavily restricted access to internet and international journalism in an attempt to quell dissent. When the countries do receive international attention, the everyday dilemmas which ordinary people experience tend to be reduced to a simple narrative of good against evil.
This depiction is partly due to historical political relations. Myanmar suffered under a repressive self-proclaimed socialist military government for 26 years, whereas a new political era between 2010-2020 led to economic prosperity in parts of the country, and consequently a predominantly positive perception of neoliberalism. The fact that China, a nominally communist state, supported the military led to further disillusionment with left-wing ideologies. In Venezuela, the political project known as chavismo emerged after Hugo Chávez’s election in 1999, with “21st-century socialism” as its flagship left-wing ideology. Fuelled by oil revenues and expanded state control over key industries, it profoundly reshaped Venezuela’s political and economic landscape over the past two decades. Over time, this model became increasingly centralized, marked by growing political repression and the steady erosion of democratic institutions. Authoritarian tendencies deepened, leaving chavismo as the dominant force in Venezuelan politics, with little room for meaningful opposition. Yet the continued struggles of opposition leaders have not gone completely unnoticed.
In both countries, opposition leaders received the Nobel Peace Prize, but not without controversy. Myanmar politician Aung San Suu Kyi won the prize in 1991 while she remained under house arrest by the military. After she entered the formal political sphere in the early 2010s, she was held responsible for the mass violence against the Rohingya population in 2017, for which Myanmar is currently facing charges at the International Court of Justice. Venezuelan leader María Corina Machado won the prize in 2025. Although she enjoys considerable support in Venezuela and among the diaspora, her repeated pledges of support for Trump’s military intervention in Venezuela underscore the difficulties Venezuelans face in judging her actions and assessing her commitment to the country. While international human rights activists have called for the withdrawal of the Nobel Peace Prize to Aung San Suu Kyi, María Corina Machado recently offered President Trump her own Nobel Peace Prize. Neither options are in accordance with Nobel Peace Prize regulations.
The controversies around the Nobel Peace Prize winners expose broader misreadings of, and unfamiliarity with, the political realities in both countries. Based on our long-term engagement as ethnographers in Myanmar and Venezuela, we argue that the situation of domestic populations inside these countries deserves more attention than reporting on bipartisan political positioning. In Myanmar, the military coup of February 2021 and the subsequent widespread popular resistance have not only resulted in extreme repression, detention of dissidents (including Aung San Suu Kyi and former President U Win Myint) and airstrikes on perceived rebellion regions resulting in countless victims, but also made the socio-economic situation throughout the country almost unbearable. Crime is rampant, security and rule of law have become practically non-existent, and inflation has risen to 400%, meaning that many people struggle to obtain food and other basic necessities. Similarly, millions of Venezuelans have faced a complex humanitarian crisis for more than a decade, marked by runaway inflation reaching up to a mindboggling 1,000,000% by 2018, severe shortages of fuel, food, and medicine, daily power outages lasting hours, limited access to clean water, and empty classrooms as many schoolteachers have left the country.
Both countries have seen a huge outflow of people, with approximately five million migrants and refugees from Myanmar now residing outside the country, predominantly in neighbouring Bangladesh and Thailand but also throughout Asia, in the US and in Europe. The recent outflow adds to previous waves of forced migration and is caused by economic degradation as well as the military conscription law. This law was enforced in January 2024 and has increasingly been implemented to force youth under the age of 35 to fight in dangerous circumstances for a cause they do not support. In Venezuela, the economic collapse, combined with rising political repression, has forced more than eight million people to leave the country. They now reside in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, the US, Spain, and other countries across Latin America and Europe.
While in Myanmar we can speak of a broad civil war combined with military repression, in Venezuela the crisis is best understood as a prolonged and overlapping set of political, social, economic and armed conflicts that permeate everyday life since 2014. Both countries have held elections which failed miserably, with the Myanmar military recently holding a three-phase national election to legitimize its ongoing rule. Election turnout was reportedly at an all-time low, despite the military pressuring the population to participate in a poll they set up to win. The most recent presidential election in Venezuela, in 2024, was similarly conducted amid widespread allegations of fraud. Despite growing popular protests, which were harshly repressed, Nicolás Maduro was inaugurated for another term. However, independent polls suggested that the opposition candidate won by a decisive margin. Following Maduro’s detention, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as interim president. Critics argue that this transition does not represent a democratic succession but rather reflects a continuation of alleged electoral irregularities.
The issue at hand is the restrictions on residents of Myanmar and Venezuela to voice their opinions publicly, leading actors and supporters on both sides of the political divide attempting to construct their versions of events. While in Myanmar the conflict environment is reduced to an armed opposition versus a ruthless military, the Venezuelan situation risks being reduced to a pro-Trump or pro-Maduro camp. What is lost in this back-and-forth of ideological conflicts are the voices of ordinary people, whose perceived needs are internationally utilized to support one particular narrative. We argue that the voices of ordinary people should be uncovered to determine how these momentous events affect their everyday lives, including through social media.
When news about the invasion of Venezuela reached Myanmar online audiences, the US embassy in Yangon (in response to its statement on Myanmar’s independence day) received close to 5000 Facebook comments overnight, with over 90% asking for a similar intervention in Myanmar. Since then, we have conducted a brief online study of the many social media reactions from people in Myanmar to the events unfolding in Venezuela in January. Reports that China criticized the US government for acting as ‘world’s judge’ have received particular cynical reactions from Myanmar dissidents, stating that the US actions are justified because the United Nations has remained inactive. While Myanmar opposition groups such as the All-Burma Federation of Students’ Union published statements condemning the US invasion of Venezuela, others reacted critically asking why they never speak out on far-reaching Chinese interference in Myanmar’s economy and armed conflict. Another comment stated that it is still better to live under the US than in China’s sphere of influence.
The comment “hey Trump we have rare earth with genocidal regime” refers to the fact that Myanmar’s natural resources are currently being exploited largely by China, which needs the minerals from northern Myanmar for its defence and renewable energy industries. The profits of this rare earth mining flow directly to the Myanmar military and a number of other armed groups, while the population suffers the impact on its health and natural environment. Myanmar activists have emphasized the presence of rare earth minerals in an attempt to persuade the US to intervene in the country’s ongoing conflicts. Social media comments further point towards Myanmar military leader’s Min Aung Hlaing’s perceived involvement in the illegal drugs trade and the booming online scam business in Southeast Asia; despite the transnational impact of these activities, no meaningful international intervention has taken place beyond the countries directly bordering on Myanmar.
If US intervention in Venezuela is seen as a combination of interest in natural resources (mainly oil) and professed concern about the freedom of the Venezuelan people, why would the US not intervene in a similar manner in Myanmar? This is not an uncommon question among Myanmar people. Following the 2021 coup, activists in Myanmar appealed in vain for the international community to invoke the Responsibility to Protect doctrine to free them from military rule and its violent repression. The answer to the question lies in the different geopolitical positions of the two countries, and the inconsistent policy (to say the least) of the US administration when it comes to international human rights protection. In the beginning of 2025, the US government announced a sudden halt to all USAID and affiliated development and humanitarian assistance programs, leaving countless refugees and dissidents from Myanmar and Venezuela without financial support overnight. Later in 2025, the US ended its protection for Myanmar and Venezuelan refugees and stopped the processing of new visa applications, although this is now being challenged in US courts.
It is obvious that the US is acting out of self-interest and does not have the interests of local populations at heart when it invades a country like Venezuela. However, this does not mean that such interventions may not be welcomed by sections of the population who have suffered repression and international neglect for decades, as the reactions on social media from Myanmar attest. While academics debate the immorality of US intervention in Venezuela, the people of Myanmar and Venezuela are living the consequences of these interventions or the lack thereof. Yet their experiences rarely make it into the discussions of even the most progressive academic or political circles. We therefore argue for more international coverage on, and solidarity with, populations living under repression in undemocratic environments such as Myanmar and Venezuela, even if they are not invaded or oppressed by western forces. Populations may equally suffer from selective international involvement and economic or political self-interest of other countries, as is the case for China, Russia and other global actors in Myanmar and Venezuela. Only a receptive and open-minded perspective can help to explain the broad variety in reactions to events like the US invasion in Venezuela, and their reach across the globe, inspiring responses as far away as Myanmar. People living under repressed circumstances may not have the luxury of choosing which sphere of influence they are subjected to, but they do consistently express desires for political freedom, economic well-being and self-governance of natural resources, notably on social media.
*The views expressed in the blog are those of the author alone. They do not reflect the position of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
** Banner photo by Zack Tu Nan
The post Myanmar online reactions to the abduction of President Maduro from Venezuela first appeared on LSE Southeast Asia Blog.
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