The United States is working to ensure American technology is used in Asia, with Casey K. Mace, senior official for APEC and economic policy, saying, “We’re very active in promoting U.S. AI options and solutions.” The pitch was made Friday on the sidelines of the APEC trade ministers’ meeting in Suzhou, China, where state-backed trade diplomacy and corporate expansion were being braided together in plain view.
Who Gets to Shape the Market
Mace said U.S. tech companies would be giving workshops at an APEC “digital week” in Chengdu in July. China is hosting the event, and Mace said “it’s an opportunity to engage with all 21 [APEC] economies.” The language is all access and opportunity from the top, but the real story is which corporate tools get normalized across the region and who gets to decide what counts as the default technology for everyone else.
Mace declined to name specific U.S. companies taking part and pushed back when asked if the United States was advocating “best in class” American tech over Chinese alternatives. He said he had met with U.S. tech companies with a presence in China and expected they would be able to expand their access to the market. That is the hierarchy in miniature: officials and firms negotiating over market access while ordinary people are left to live inside the systems those firms build.
China is hosting this year’s APEC trade ministers’ meetings, which are set to wrap up in Shenzhen later this year. Working-level conversations alongside Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings in China this month focused on promoting U.S. AI in food traceability, genome sequencing and biotech, Mace said. The apparatus is not just selling software; it is trying to lock in influence over the infrastructure of food, biology and data.
The Diplomatic Theater Around Tech Power
Mace said the tone had been “positive,” which he attributed partly to the “very successful meeting between President Trump and President Xi” in Beijing last week. The summit language is polished, but the substance is a contest between state-backed corporate blocs trying to secure the region’s digital future.
Following the high-level engagement, the two countries have agreed to begin discussions about safe development of AI, China’s foreign ministry confirmed on Tuesday. It was unclear when or how those talks would begin. That uncertainty hangs over the whole arrangement: the people most affected by AI deployment are not at the table, while governments and companies talk about “safe development” in the abstract.
Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said, “There is pressure to distribute American compute globally.” He added, “The Trump administration is right in trying to advocate and implement with this. But it will compete with Chinese hyperscalers and Chinese AI labs that are attempting to do exactly the same.” The quote lays out the competition cleanly: not public need, but rival power centers racing to spread their own compute and capture the field.
What They Call Competition
Fedasiuk also said he was watching for coordination between the U.S. and Chinese sides to screen vendors of DNA synthesis services so as to prevent the manufacture of another pandemic. Even here, the language of safety runs through institutions and vendor screening, not through any democratic control from below. The machinery of oversight remains in the hands of states and their approved experts.
The reporting also noted that China is racing to build alternatives that are often cheaper, shaping the competitive landscape in Asia. Cheaper for whom, and under what conditions, is left hanging in the air. What is clear is that Asia is being treated as a market to be won, with U.S. officials promoting American AI options and Chinese firms pushing their own alternatives, while the people living under these systems are expected to absorb the consequences.
The APEC trade ministers’ meetings in China are set to wrap up in Shenzhen later this year, and U.S. tech companies are expected to give workshops at an APEC “digital week” in Chengdu in July. The calendar keeps moving, the institutions keep meeting, and the corporate-state project keeps expanding its reach across borders under the banner of cooperation.