Defrost setting: the Xi-Biden summit

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Getting across Europe is most often quicker and easier by air than by rail. There are plenty of national networks, but international connections are patchy. If the EU wants to meet its climate targets, then it's going to have to get its track together. And everybody on some level loves a particularly good picture of themselves. But in South Korea, people are spending serious sums to get what are called body profile photos. And the obsession comes at more costs than that. First up, though, Over the course of more than three hours yesterday, the leaders of the world's two superpowers had what appeared to be a perfectly cordial online chat. Presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden exchanged smiles and waves and reassuring words that couldn't have come at a better time.

This video chat mattered because the relationship has been in bad shape since the Trump years and hasn't recovered.

David Rennie is the Economist's Beijing bureau chief.

Low level contacts have been very frosty, even as tensions build on everything from human rights in Hong Kong and Xinjiang and Taiwan to the trade war that Joe Biden, to China's great frustration, hasn't unwound. We still have the same Trump tariffs, still have some of the same export controls, so. So this was an attempt to try and stop this from escalating further.

And recent communications have been, as you say, frosty. How was it this time around?

Certainly the mood music was deliberately much warmer. The public remarks that were shown on tv, you saw Xi Jinping go out of his way to call Joe Biden, his old friend. That's a nod to the fact that they spent quite a lot of time together when they were both vice presidents. A few years ago, both men talked about how they have a great responsibility to make sure that they manage their differences. Seems to me, our responsibility as leaders of China and the United States to ensure that the competition between our countries does not vary into conflict, whether intended or unintended. I think that was the core of this meeting. They were not going to come out with a deal or agreements on any real substantive policy dispute. But it was about showing that even if lower level officials really have very little to agree on at the moment, the two guys at the top understand they have a kind of historical responsibility to stop this relationship from spiraling into something like conflict.

And what was on the agenda?

There was a lot on the agenda. They talked about areas of difference. So Joe Biden, because he has domestic politics to worry about, was careful to talk about abusive trade practices that hurt American workers, human rights in all kinds of areas. But they then did talk about areas where their interests intersect. They talked about Afghanistan. They talked about the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. They talked about energy security and the pandemic and climate change. And the Chinese needed to hear Joe Biden say that America does not support the independence of Taiwan, the island that China claims for its own. Now, that's the America's standing policy. But they needed to hear Joe Biden say it because he has said some slightly ambiguous things recently about whether America is in some ways bound to come to Taiwan's defense in the appalling event that there was a war between the Chinese and the Taiwanese that might drag the Americans in.

So in that sense, Mr. Xi, and China more generally got something out of this meeting, did America?

I think that America believes that it needs to send a strong message to the Chinese government that there are problems that need to be solved by the two together, and they will work with China, but they won't do it as a favor to China. I thought it was very interesting how in the readouts that we got from the White House, the National Security Council, they made clear that several times President Biden told President Xi, if we want to work with you on important things like climate change, it's not as a favor to China. And we don't expect you to ask for a price in return. Because China has been trying to say, if you want to talk to us about nice things like climate change, you have to stop criticizing us on bad things like Xinjiang or Hong Kong. Joe Biden is sending the signal that's not how it works when you're one of the world's two most powerful countries. He explicitly said, we want to work with you on these things because that's what responsible great powers do, not as some kind of part of a deal. And I think that was a very important message that he wanted to get across.

So that's what the readouts say. That's the sort of the official view. How is this actually landing in Beijing, though?

So the Chinese state media, which is obviously extremely controlled, took a deliberate decision to make this look like a good meeting for China. They showed Joe Biden giving that important insurance on Taiwan. It was a kind of respectful presentation. But the TV news the evening of the talks showed Joe Biden taking notes diligently while Xi Jinping spoke. It was that kind of propaganda angle. But this is at least an improvement on where things have been. We have had Chinese government spokesmen really piling into the Americans over everything from the retreat from Afghanistan to spreading conspiracy theories about COVID beginning in an American military base. So to have a kind of fairly normal presentation of this meeting as two powerful leaders meet and talk about important things, is already stepping back from the brink. And I think that for the Americans, they'll see that as a win.

You say coming back from the brink. I mean, how bad have things been?

They've been bad in a political sense and bad in a kind of danger of conflict sense. You have the Chinese government extremely concerned that the Taiwanese government, which they detest because it's not in favor of unification with the Chinese mainland, they think that America has been egging it on, selling it the wrong kind of weapons, offering much too clear a hint that America would come to Taiwan's defense if there are war. And that has been really driving, I think, not just kind of paranoia, but a real fear on the Chinese side that America might try and rewrite the rules of that Taiwan relationship at a time when the Chinese have been investing massively in a military whose real design is to be able to take Taiwan, even in a conflict where America is involved. And so we're not out of those woods yet. It should be crazy that two nuclear powers could even contemplate having a war. But unfortunately, the dynamic of Taiwan remains extremely dangerous. Maybe not in the next kind of year or so, but over the next 10 years. Really, really dangerous tensions there. And so there is no alternative but to have the two top leaders talking about where their red lines are and, as I say, how they can manage their differences.

And so this meeting, then some tentative steps ahead, but ultimately not very big ones.

That's right. If you take a single issue. I mean, China is currently building an enormous number of nuclear weapons back in the real Cold war between the Americans and the Soviets, Even at the worst of the Cold War, the Americans and the Russians could talk about things like nuclear doctrine, nuclear weapons safety. Who would talk? Who if there was a kind of accident or a crisis. We're told by American officials that President Biden did try and broach the subject of strategic stability, which is kind of code for how do we avoid an accidental nuclear war? And the Chinese were kind of tentatively willing to talk about that stuff, but we're still miles and miles apart. And the real big picture is that the Chinese leadership are convinced that they are rising and that America is in decline, and that if the relationship is bad, it's because America is not yet willing to accept China is winning. And so that America is lashing out in a kind of vindictive way. And that framing has not been changed by this video chat yesterday. So it's good that it happened, but it has not solved very much.

David, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, take out a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@Equality.com IntelligenceOffer the link is in the show notes. In 1977, the German Electronic pioneers Kraftwerk released a song about a train, well, about a train network, the Trans Europe Express, which spanned the continent and connected 130 cities.

That is at last the news. Oberbeet Van Snell Realver the Trans Europe Express.

The service faded following its 1970s peak and it stopped completely in 1995. National carriers had crowded out the international ones and anyway more people were flying. Such is the story of integrated European railways. Grand plans come and go, but if the EU has any hope of meeting its climate goals, that's a problem.

The EU needs to cut carbon output in transportation and it would love to do that by getting travelers to switch from using planes to trains.

Matt Steinglass is the Economist's Europe correspondent.

But if you look at the numbers, doing that is going to take an immense amount of investment into rail infrastructure.

Why? What's wrong with the infrastructure?

As it stands so Europe has good national railway networks, but they are often not linked to each other very well. Governments put lots of money into their own national railways. They put money into domestic high speed lines which are tremendously expensive, but then they often leave the connections between those high speed lines and their neighbors. High speed lines on very slow old fashioned routes, often windy, and cause lots of delays. And there are regulatory differences from country to country. Different countries have different voltages. There are four different voltage levels across Europe. There are different track widths left over in the Baltic Countries and in Spain and Iberia and everybody has different signaling and warning systems, which is incredibly important, especially if you're running a high speed train. You want to know if there's a cow on the track far ahead. And integrating all those things is very complicated. They've been trying to do it since 1996 and they still have a long way to go.

So with the new press to, to reduce carbon emissions, what's the EU doing to. To finish this job?

The EU declared 2021 the European Year of Rail.

The European Year of Rail has finally reached its most important moment.

They had a nice publicity event for this called Connecting Europe Express, where they put together a train and put a bunch of European officials on it, have them travel around to 26 different countries in Europe in September and October. And you know, when setting up this.

Train to travel across Europe, we encountered.

Many obstacles trying to make the various.

National railway systems fit. The problem is there were a symbolic problem actually of the whole situation was that most of the cars on the train were built in the 1980s because newer ones were less likely to have been certified by the national railway boards of all of those 26 countries, which is just, it just symbolizes the same problem that we've been talking about. The EU wants to have a great continental system of rail, but it's still broken up country by country.

And is there evidence that if they were to finish that puzzle that there would be plenty of demand for it?

Rail is a really important player in a number of European countries. If you look at the amount of distance traveled by land, though, it's only about 8% of the total distance traveled by land. Most travel, most land travel is still by car. If you compare that to air, there aren't very good stats on international rail travel. But what they do have at Eurostat shows that there were 6.5 million international trips by train from Germany in 2019 and 110 million by air just inside the EU. So the shift from air to rail is going to be a huge project. And it's not clear that anybody is really willing to invest the sums of money that would take to get a really large percentage of air travel to move to rail.

But is that just a sort of chicken and egg problem that the demand would be there if the system were good?

Yes, part of that is true. If you look at places where high speed rail has been built from one city to another, you find two things happen. One is in some places the air travel drops dramatically. If you look at the Milan to Rome route for Example, they built a high speed rail train that opened in 2007. I believe there were fewer than half as many flights within nine years. In other cases, you find that suddenly demand appears to go from one city to another that hadn't been there before. It becomes very easy all of a sudden to go from Amsterdam to Paris. It's three and a half hours on the Thales. Lots more people do it now. So if you straighten the tracks, you could really make it a lot faster. And I think people would travel a lot more than they do right now.

But as you say, that's complicated and expensive. How do you think the EU could get there?

One of the issues is that there's an unfair playing field at the moment. Fuel for airlines and airline emissions is almost entirely untaxed. So that's a tremendous subsidy to air travel, the most dirty form of travel. A second thing is there are new entrants into this field, private rail competitors who can dramatically cut costs and raise traffic on a lot of these routes. But those national rail carriers tend not to welcome competition. So in some countries, for example, in Germany, the company that owns the tracks, which is supposed to treat all comers equally, is a branch of Deutsche Bahn, which is the big company that runs the trains on the tracks. They charge very high usage fees to run on their tracks, and effectively that ends up discouraging the new entrants from coming into the market. Everybody remembers how glorious European trains were in the age of the Orient Express. But until Europe starts taking some of those steps, passengers are going to think of rail nostalgically and not as the transport of the future.

Matt, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

In South Korea, an obsession with beauty runs deep.

I feel like I can never be.

Beautiful enough in South Korea.

Korean beauty standards are kind of very, very strict and crazy.

Now a new online trend is taking it to the next level.

I spoke to a personal trainer at a fancy gym in Gangnam, which is a posh part of Seoul, and he told me he started getting lots of unusual requests from people, mostly women in their 20s and 30s, earlier this year.

Lena Shipper is the Economist's sole bureau chief.

They asked him to draw up these very excessive training plans and dieting rules because they all wanted to look perfect for their body profile photos.

Their what now?

A body profile is a set of professional pictures that somebody takes after getting in the best shape of their life.

As for weights, I target a different.

Area each day, and for me, I care most about the lower body, the booty, and especially for women, as we lose body fat, we are going to. And it's incredibly popular on social media in South Korea. If you search for the hashtag body Profiling Korean on Instagram, you'll find about two and a half million glossy pictures of oiled up six packs, flex muscles, girls in their best swimsuits, that kind of thing.

The kind of thing that takes a fair bit of preparation, I guess.

So people will often take their preparation to the extreme. They'll put their bodies through a lot to really look their best for these pictures. They'll start working out, dieting months in advance of the shoot. They'll buy multiple outfits. Some will get fake tan to help with muscle definition. They'll get their hair done, their nails, their makeup. And all of that obviously really adds up. A training program and photo session can set you back one and a half million won, which is about thirteen hundred dollars. But some people splurge even more at the gym. I visited programs at 2 and a half million won and the most individual tailored ones can cost up to 7 million.

And the point here, for all that money, all that effort, is just to get some particularly good photographs.

I think the point, like everything on social media, is to impress those around you. But there's a bit more to it. I spoke to Jool Soo hyun, who's a 27 year old woman who booked a body profile photo session recently. And she explained that buying a house or even getting a job seems out of reach for young people in South Korea. So getting your body profile photos taken is a way to get a sense of achievement and to feel valued. She also said that working out, how to get a sense of purpose at a time when she really didn't like her job and she felt she was just, you know, going to work every day and very exhausted and didn't really have anything else to look forward to.

So there is a positive psychological effect here and I suppose it does encourage people to get into good shape.

Well, it's not exactly just about health so much I think, as it's about the look of health and the sort of appearance of being that kind of person. Some commentators have voiced concern about the long term impact of this trend on mental health and eating habits. Even the personal trainer actually said that he was initially thrilled about the trend, but he's now concerned that it might harm his clients. He said that people often came back a few weeks after their photo shoots looking worse than they did before.

Okay, so not getting into such great shape then in the longer run, I mean, given that, do you think this trend will last?

Body profiles are possibly a passing trend, but the underlying issues and trends in society that lead people to take them and to be interested in this are longer standing. One academic I spoke to was Yoo Yoon Jae, who studies youth culture at Seougang University in Seoul, and he thinks that the attention young people pay to their online image mirrors day to day life to some degree. In South Korea, looking your best in public is considered polite and particularly among older people commenting on others appearance and sort of telling you you know you've put on a bit of weight, like maybe consider losing. It remains quite common and is not necessarily considered rude, although that's starting to change a bit. But even just by walking around Seoul, you'll be constantly reminded that your appearance needs to change, that there's something wrong with you, that you're somehow inadequate. There's advertising in cinemas. You walk into the ladies bathroom and there'll be a door telling you to reconsider your popcorn. Or you walk along a subway corridor and there'll be a massive poster with a serious looking doctor looking down on you saying think you're pretty? Think again. Until that obsession with looks is addressed in a meaningful way in the country, it'll probably be tough to convince young Koreans to stop following crazy diets and trends like the body profile one.

Thanks very much for your time, Lena.

Thank you very much for having me.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and see you back here tomorrow. Sam.