The Red Leaf Express

For more than 20 years, a major American research center has asked people around the world how they feel about the United States and China. This year, the order flipped: Across 36 countries, China now has a more favorable image than the United States in 25 of them—including Canada, Mexico, much of Europe and most of Southeast Asia. Joey Chou examines what that shift measures and what it does not. Public affection may be drifting toward Beijing, but opinion is not the same as power, and favorability is not an alliance. In the Indo-Pacific, the real test is whether changing attitudes lead governments to change their behavior.

At one minute past noon last Monday, a ballistic missile broke the surface of the Pacific, fired from a Chinese submarine somewhere underwater. It flew for roughly half an hour and came down in the South Pacific — where three Chinese survey ships were already waiting to measure exactly where it landed.

Last Tuesday, China’s foreign minister called America’s top diplomat — and the two governments came away with two different phone calls. Beijing’s readout carried a pointed warning about Taiwan. Washington’s readout did not mention Taiwan at all.

On Tuesday, China's newest aircraft carrier — the Fujian — transited the Taiwan Strait.

This past week, two things were true about the world at the same time.

Five hours. That's how long it took this week for Donald Trump to go from threatening to bomb Iran's Kharg Island — the island that handles roughly ninety percent of Iran's oil exports — to announcing on social media that the United States and Iran were about to sign a peace agreement. Five hours, on the eve of his eightieth birthday. Around the same time, three thousand kilometers away, six Chinese coast guard vessels — each at least six thousand tons, larger than anything Japan's coast guard operates — were finishing a five-day patrol through waters east of Taiwan, logging the registration details of nearly two hundred ships. Two very different stories. Same week. And the same underlying instinct: when you have leverage, and you suspect the window to use it is closing, you move. Fast.

In the summer of 2026, the United States sent seventeen of its most powerful business executives to Beijing. The list included the CEOs of Nvidia and Qualcomm — the two American companies most directly affected by US chip export controls on China. It included the head of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager. It included the chiefs of Visa and Mastercard. Seventeen people who between them represent the commanding heights of American technology, finance, and payment infrastructure — all in Beijing, in the same week.

On May 27th, the leaders of Japan and the Philippines sat down in Tokyo and signed a joint statement. They agreed to elevate their relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership — deeper intelligence sharing, military equipment transfers, coast guard cooperation. And they agreed to begin formal negotiations to draw a maritime boundary between them in the waters east of Taiwan.

In March 1996, China fired ballistic missiles into the waters off Taiwan's coast.

Taiwan's president, Lai Ching-te [LYE CHING-tuh], is delivering a speech. It is the one-year anniversary of his inauguration. And the word he uses to describe himself — the political identity he claims in public, on this day, in this moment — matters more than it has at any point in his presidency.