ExclusivePutin Proposes Meeting with Trump in China | China in Focus

Welcome to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. Our top story, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposing to meet President Trump in China next month. He also agrees to come to the table and resume talks to end the Ukraine war. We're on the key takeaways of Putin's back-to-back meeting with U.S. and China envoys. The U.S. strengthening its cooperation with India. Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized maritime access and expanded purchases of U.S. technology during his visit to India. They're a strong strategic partner. Forced organ harvesting in China. How does Beijing mask the crime? A new report sheds light on it. And Europe's last major penicillin plant is fighting to survive against cheaper Chinese competition. It's warning if it shuts down, Europe could become fully dependent on China for this life-saving antibiotic. A Trump-Putin meeting in China. This is what Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed in his meeting with U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff Wednesday. Days earlier, Putin had floated the idea of meeting Trump and Xi on the sidelines of the APEC meeting in China next month, though the Kremlin said Monday that no agenda had been discussed yet. Putin also told Witkoff that he's willing in principle to resume talks with the U.S. and Ukraine next month on ending the war. This comes after President Trump saying he's open to meeting with China and Russia to discuss ending the war without Zelensky. Anything I can do to end the war, whether somebody's there or not, whatever I can do to end the war. Back to the proposed peace talks, a Kremlin aide said talks should focus on building a security system for Russia and Ukraine after the end of the conflict. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he's ready for diplomacy. I always say that we are open to negotiate in any format, any topic, but don't speak about us without us, please. President Trump has been upping pressure on Zelensky to come to an agreement with Russia. Ukraine has to want to settle this war. Zelensky has to want to settle this war. And if he doesn't, I think it's going to be a very bad thing. Russia also expressed interest in resuming economic cooperation with the U.S. Putin noted Moscow is ready to help Washington on Iran. Russian authorities also released a former American school teacher, Stephen Hubbard, who had been imprisoned in Russia since 2022. Witkoff escorted him back to the U.S. The two are set to land in Washington Wednesday evening. Hours later, meeting with Witkoff, Putin also met with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in St. Petersburg. Putin told Li that Russia's relations with China are successful and dynamic, adding it continues to develop. Russia also said Wednesday that a deal on the gas pipeline project powered by CHI may come by the end of this year. formerly known as the Power of Siberia II, the pipeline is expected to send Russian gas through Mongolia to China and it would more than double Russian gas exports to China. The project had been stalled for a long time due to disputes over pricing. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is calling for a free and open Indo-Pacific. He spoke Tuesday at the Freedom 250 reception in India's largest city. And in particular for the United States and India, a free and secure Indo-Pacific. One in which no nation can claim dominance or ownership of international shipping lanes. On that issue, we are 100% and perfectly aligned. appraised progress in defense and civilian nuclear cooperation. He also urged India to increase purchases of U.S. technologies and systems, saying they could strengthen security and prosperity in both countries. Technological advancement allows us to do as human beings, it allows us to do human things better. So the challenge we face is how do we harness the power of superintelligence? How do we harness the power of all of these things in a way that is beneficial? Understanding that there will be downsides to it. We have to mitigate the downsides, but we must dominate and accentuate the positive aspects of it. The two sides also discussed expanding energy trade. Rubio visited a major Indian refinery. He said he would encourage the complex to refine more Venezuelan crude. India is recognized as the world's largest democracy by population, and it is one of the key members of the Quad, a security partnership involving the U.S., India, Japan, and Australia. A new report details how the abuse of forced organ harvesting is masked by the Chinese Communist Party. The regime's hierarchy leads doctors in China to hold back from speaking out for victims. NTD's Melina Weisskopf spoke with Stephanie Cox. Here's more. This report exposes essentially how there are no independent safeguards to protect people from forced organ harvesting inside of China. Now, that's mainly because the transplant oversight bodies and ethics committees are all set up within the CCP's hierarchy. So a quote from an exiled former internal medicine doctor from Liaoning province actually illustrates this quite well. He told researchers, quote, if you yourself dare to speak up, you'd be the next to disappear. So this makes not only less likely for doctors and other concerned people to speak out for victims for fear of retribution, but it also enables the CCP to orchestrate a cover-up to mask the abuse from the international community. So there are several details in this report that illustrate how this works exactly. One example is China's National Organ Donation and Transplant Committee. Two of the members from the Logistics Support Department of the Central Military Commission are a part of this committee, and that's China's top military body. So according to the report, that military presence highlights direct People's Liberation Army involvement at the highest level of transplant plant governance. As far as the scope of the abuse, we know a 2019 report by the China Tribunal in London showed that it's taking place on a significant scale with Falun Gong practitioners being the main victims. Is there any mention in the report about how this hierarchy facilitates the targeting of vulnerable populations? Right. There's a notable case included in this report. It involves a prominent transplant surgeon by the name of Zhang Xuesen, who simultaneously held a leadership role in an anti-Falun Gong organization and Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, as a spiritual group that's been brutally persecuted in China since 1999. Additionally, there are several cases where transplant surgeons or transplant center directors were also CCP members, and they were based closest to the areas where the CCP has ongoing persecutions. For example, Wenhao and Yanying are based in Xinjiang, which is where the CCP is carrying out the genocide of the Uyghurs. There are another four that are identified as officials working at major hospitals and provinces where the most extensive sustained persecution of Falun Gong is taking place. Now, this report gives several recommendations to government officials, like imposing sanctions and visa restrictions against individuals involved in this organ trafficking. The U.S. Senate, though, has passed such a bill sanctioning perpetrators just last month. But the House needs to approve this bill again with the changes that were made to it before the president can ultimately sign it into law. All right. Thank you for that update. NTD congressional correspondent Melina Weiskopf. A warning from America's diplomats down under. the U.S. Embassy in Australia is condemning the Chinese Communist Party's reach beyond China's borders, calling it deeply concerning. Beijing's efforts to monitor, intimidate, and pressure critics abroad have been documented over many years. The U.S. Embassy says the United States stands with Australians in defending their freedoms and national sovereignty. The statement came a day after Australian federal police urged the public to report suspected foreign interference. Since 2018, Australian police have charged eight people with foreign interference offenses. At least five of these eight people appear to have been linked to China. And New Zealand's intelligence agency says China is the only country spying on New Zealand at scale. In the hills of the Austrian Alps, Europe's last plant that makes penicillin from start to finish is fighting for survival. Pharmaceutical company Sandoz owns the plant. It has been watching competitors closing or moving to China, where manufacturers churn out the same life-saving drug at a much lower price. If we as the last ones would also move out, then we would be fully dependent on our competitors, which are in China and India. Sandoz blames the situation on European governments pursuing low costs at the expense of supply chain resilience. This comes as European governments are raising the alarm about China's increased stronghold over Europe's medical industry. Back in 2025, EU health ministers warned between 80% and 90% of antibiotics are made in Asia, mostly China. This is not by accident. In China, labor and energy costs are cheaper, and environmental safety standards face much less scrutiny. With the help of Western technical know-how, acquisitions of Western companies, and massive subsidies, China's medical companies were able to make their mark in the world. As a result, Europe has seen penicillin exports take a nosedive and a sharp rise in Chinese penicillin imports. This raises concerns that China will use medicine as trade leverage, the same way China weaponizes access to rare earths. The U.S. has no domestic capacity for making penicillin ingredients or their core precursor. The last U.S. manufacturing plant capable of making penicillin stopped operations in 2004 after it was driven out of business due to China flooding the market with cheap alternatives. South Korean companies Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are upgrading their China factories to produce more advanced memory chips. According to four sources speaking to Reuters, the two companies seek to manufacture NAND flash memory chips, the kind of memory chips used in smartphones, PCs and AI data center drives in their Chinese plants. Both companies confirm that they are making the upgrades in consultation with the U.S. government. The U.S. imposes export controls on chipmaking equipment to counter China. If companies want to install U.S.-made equipment in China to manufacture sensitive technologies like chips, they would need to periodically acquire U.S. licenses. Coming up, the U.S. and China are racing to dominate in AI, but there's one big obstacle, power. Can America generate enough energy to win the race? More on that after the break here on China In Focus. Welcome back to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. The U.S. and China are racing to dominate in artificial intelligence, but there's a major obstacle, energy. Goldman Sachs warns power shortages could slow the AI boom. So can America build enough power to stay ahead of China? To discuss, I spoke with Michael Lucci. He's the founder and CEO of State Armor, an organization that helps states develop solutions to global security threats, especially those posed by the Chinese regime Michael Lucci thank you so much for joining us great to have you back on the show thank you tiffany now there's a lot of focus on advanced AI chips for the AI race between the U.S. and China but less talked about is the energy consumption that's needed so Goldman Sachs actually just issued a warning that energy bottlenecks are set to stall the AI race AI race that's according to Axios talk to us about that element where is the energy coming from and what are the concerns here the general concern is that the United States hasn't really added much energy capacity over the last 20 years for anything, for data centers, manufacturing facilities, or otherwise. Part of that is because we were offshoring so much of our high energy intensive production, steel, aluminum manufacturing, we're offshoring a lot of that to communist China, which was a huge mistake. And now we realize that we need to bring that back. We also need to build out these AI data centers at the same time. And so we need to quickly pivot towards adding more energy capacity back onto the grid of all sorts, nuclear, nat gas, alternative energies, whatever it is we need to power growing manufacturing capacities and growing artificial intelligence capacities. We need to add energy to the grid to do that so that we're having more supply, lower cost of energy, but more availability of energy for industrial uses. now speaking of data centers there's been a lot of talk about them in the headlines now CNN has a recent piece out titled the U.S. is fighting over data centers China is building them fast part of that is they're building them kind of in like the Xinjiang desert region there's not a lot of people there also you're not really allowed to protest over there so it's a bit different but talk to us about the you know difference in governing and why we are seeing that we're in the U.S. there does seem to be a lot of protests so China can obviously just say we're going to put a data center, or we're going to put an airport, or we're going to put a missile field, wherever they want, just put it there. So, you know, citizens in China don't have any rights to resist any of these things. In the United States, we do it differently because we do give individual rights. We have states' rights, community rights, and individual rights. And in many cases, local communities are not so happy about having data centers come in the United States. Some of those are for legitimate reasons. You know, maybe a data center doesn't make sense aesthetically or otherwise in a certain area. And then some of it is based upon concerns about water usage and potentially electricity usage that are probably not as well-founded. There's arguments about data centers using huge amounts of water. That's generally an unfounded claim that actually traces back to a journalist who misestimated that by actually a thousandfold in her initial publications. In terms of electricity usage, this is where it is important for those who are developing data centers to be bringing energy online as they do so, so that they're powering their own energy usage, and then they're selling extra energy onto the grid to lower costs in communities instead of raising costs. So that's an area where there is real work to be done. The president has declared that he wants them to be bringing their own power, their own generation online as they build out these data centers. But I think it's also important to note that You know, China plays in this discussion within the United States. So on the one hand, you know, it's just a state decree that they're going to build something in China. On the other hand, we have a democratic process for these things in the United States. We have an open system. And so they want to exploit that where they can. Neville Roy Singham, who seems to be involved in, you know, funding anything negative in the United States that's on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. He's involved in funding some of the protest groups that are opposing data centers across the United States. So that needs to be more clearly exposed. Actually, his funding generally needs to be cut off from coming into the United States. It needs to be clear where foreign adversaries are playing in opposing data centers here in the United States. Just to expand on that last point, because there is reporting about those foreign funds and foreign influence behind some of these protests or negative coverage that we've been seeing. What is the goal here, though? Why that negative coverage? This is part and parcel of what Communist China has been pushing within the United States in general, which is they just don't want us to build. They understand that the country that can build energy, build manufacturing, build products, build data centers, that's the country that's going to be dominant in the 21st century. And they've actually done a really good job in terms of convincing us to not build things over the last 20 years. We've been offshoring manufacturing to China, and we're finding out that that's a huge mistake because it's harder for us to produce things we need, whether it's medicines or missiles or rare earth magnets or anything in between. So they're just continuing the same playbook that they've been using over the last 20 years to convince us to not do things. They've done it in the energy space. They've really advocated in various ways for us to not build out energy independence. luckily we generally ignored that not completely but we generally ignored uh those agitation campaigns and we are now the biggest energy producer in the world we could help ourselves we could help allies if we'd gone the way that communist china wanted us to go which is more like europe you know they're depending for energy on russia they're depending from energy on china they can't take care of themselves in europe we have to help them with energy in europe uh so that's where they want us to go is sort of a vassalized position where we depend on outsiders on China for energy resources. The same thing is happening here with artificial intelligence data centers. If we don't build them, then we're going to depend on China for those tools of computation and then for artificial intelligence models as well. Now, on that note, it's been said that energy security is national security. So to your last point there when it comes to this ai race why is it important that the u.s stays ahead or wins this in terms of say national security or what would it look like if china were to win if china were to win then we would likely depend upon them for some of the most important technologies and inputs into our economy into our well-being uh whether it's drug discovery which is probably one of the things we're going to figure out through artificial intelligence is how to make new drugs to solve diseases, whether it's building, you know, more advanced weapons, once they have the best artificial intelligence tools, if they ever get there, they're going to close off our access to that so that they could just sort of separate and have better technologies from us. And then, you know, that would have an economic and military application as well. So if they went out, they're going to have better technologies, they're going to be setting global standards for technological issues. And they're just going to be able to have more capacity to outcompete us, whether it's in an economic fight or it's on a battlefield. And furthermore, if they win out and we depend on them for artificial intelligence tools, they'll develop, if they haven't already, they'll develop the capacity to sabotage what those outputs are when they're going to a sensitive American user. There is a study from Booz Allen that showed that some of that's already happening with Chinese artificial intelligence tools, that if it detects that you're close to United States government or defense contractor, it might give you worse code. They would figure out over time, they wouldn't necessarily do that systematically. They would figure out who individual users were, and they would figure out how to collect intelligence from them, and then to send them corrupted code or corrupted manufacturing processes in order to really undermine the United States, as they already do in so many other ways. And given all that you just laid out, in your view, what are the steps the U.S. needs to take to stay ahead or win this AI race? We should continue to close off China's access to the most advanced artificial intelligence chips. So this is where we retain a significant advantage over China is the NVIDIA chips that they generally don't have access to. Those are multiples better than the alternative. Those are much better than what Huawei produces for Chinese users. So we should continue to close off their access to those most advanced tools. And furthermore, we should essentially punish the Chinese firms that are involved in stealing our intellectual property through distilling our most advanced artificial intelligence models. It's come out through Anthropic and from OpenAI that China's involved in this industrial scale distillation campaign. So we should figure out ways to sanction the companies that are involved in doing that. Now, on the domestic front, we should be building out the electricity generation and capacity in the data centers we need to win this fight. And those are somewhat two separate things. We should be building the data centers we need. But furthermore, we should just be building out a lot of electricity capacity to deal with data centers, but also to reshore broader manufacturing industrial processes. Well, definitely a lot here for sure. Michael Lucia, as always, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. That's all for today's China in Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. If you have any feedback on the show or have something you'd like to see us cover, send us an email at ChinaInFocus at NTD.com. We'd love to hear from you. For on-the-clock original news coverage, visit us at NTD.com or download our NTD app. Thanks for watching. See you tomorrow.