Chinese Companies Didn't Wait for Negotiations to End

The ink wasn't dry on the Trump-Xi truce before Chinese executives started making moves in the U.S. market.

Guo Renjie, CEO of humanoid robot startup Zeroth, told CNBC he is currently in talks with Best Buy about selling a toy-sized interactive robot in U.S. and European stores starting this fall. He claims the company pulled in significant orders at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

Zou Ping, co-founder of AI Speech — which makes AI-powered microphones, speakers, and digital note-taking tablets used in corporate meeting rooms and university classrooms — told CNBC the same thing. He just returned from the U.S. and is exploring acquisitions and local hiring, including conversations with New York electronics retailer B&H. His read on the situation: "The worst is over."

Both executives spoke to CNBC's Evelyn Cheng in Suzhou last week. These are companies with products, distribution conversations, and timelines.

Tariffs Helped. Branding and Data Security Are the Real Wall.

Even with tariffs dropping from 145% to roughly 30%, Chinese companies say tariffs aren't their biggest U.S. obstacle.

Zou Ping said it plainly — branding is the harder problem. American consumers and retailers don't know these companies. Add data security concerns on top of that, and you've got a trust deficit that no trade truce can paper over in 90 days.

If Chinese tech companies solve the branding problem through acquisitions of American firms and local hires — which is exactly what AI Speech is pursuing — then the "buy American" argument gets a lot more complicated. A Chinese-owned company with American branding and American employees isn't the same as a Chinese import. Policymakers haven't caught up to that reality.

The Fed's New Data Blows Up the Trade War's Core Claim

While business journalists in Suzhou were reporting green shoots, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a May 4, 2026 analysis that has received little mainstream attention.

The conclusion: the U.S. trade deficit ended 2025 at $1.2 trillion — almost unchanged from 2024. Years of tariffs. Hundreds of billions in economic disruption. Zero net improvement in the overall trade balance.

The New York Fed researchers Hunter L. Clark and Gregory Simitian showed exactly where the money went instead. The U.S. deficit with China did shrink — but the U.S. deficit with ASEAN nations surged by a nearly equivalent amount. Vietnam was the single largest driver of that increase.

Simultaneously, China's global trade surplus jumped sharply — from $1 trillion to $1.2 trillion.

Chinese goods aren't disappearing because of tariffs. They're traveling through Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and other ASEAN nations before entering the U.S. market. The "Made in Vietnam" label doesn't mean what it used to.

The New York Fed also flagged that U.S. import data underreports what's actually coming in from China — a known statistical discrepancy that makes the deficit look smaller than it is.

What Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

The trade war — started under Trump in 2018, maintained by Biden, and escalated again in 2025 — has not reduced the U.S. trade deficit in any meaningful way after seven years.

What it has done: made goods more expensive for American consumers, scrambled supply chains, handed ASEAN countries an enormous economic windfall, and incentivized Chinese manufacturers to build routing operations through third countries.

Wikipedia's running summary of the trade war notes that at the end of Trump's first term, American media widely characterized the effort as a failure. The Biden administration kept every tariff in place. Now the second Trump administration pushed tariffs to 145% before pulling back — and the deficit is exactly where it started.

What This Means for Regular Americans

If you shop at Best Buy, a Chinese humanoid robot company may be on the shelves by Christmas. If your company uses conference room microphones, AI Speech is actively trying to sell you its product through a U.S. acquisition wrapper.

Meanwhile, the trade deficit you were promised would be fixed is still $1.2 trillion. The Chinese goods you were told would stop coming are rerouting through Southeast Asia. And the tariff revenue being collected is a tax paid by American importers and consumers, not Beijing.

The truce bought time. It didn't buy results. And the businesses on the ground in Suzhou already know it — which is why they're not waiting around.