WSJ What’s News - China Accuses U.S. of Undermining Trade Truce

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

A.M. Edition for June 2. Beijing points to recent export controls on AI chips and a crackdown on student visas in contending the U.S. broke a tariff reprieve between the two countries. Plus, Poland elects a conservative leader with ties to President Trump, breaking a streak of victories by centrists across Europe. And reporter Vicky Ge Huang joins us from a major bitcoin summit as the crypto industry shows off its newfound sway in Washington. Luke Vargas hosts.  Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Miller Lite. The light beer brewed for people who love the taste of beer and the perfect pairing for your game time. When Miller Lite set out to brew a light beer, they had to choose great taste or 90 calories per can. They chose both because they knew the best part of beer is the beer. Your game time tastes like Miller time. Learn more at MillerLight.ca. Must be legal drinking age. More signs of trouble in U.S.-China trade talks. Plus Poland elects a conservative leader with ties to President Trump, breaking a streak of victories by centrists across Europe. We saw Noworowski meeting Trump last month in the White House, and we also saw the U.S.

Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, saying he needed to be the next president of Poland. We don't know exactly how this affected the race, but there is a huge amount of support for the United States and Poland. And the FBI investigates a flamethrower attack in Colorado as a potential act of terror. It's Monday, June 2nd. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

China is hitting back against claims by President Trump that it violated a trade truce with the U.S., with Beijing claiming that recent actions by Washington had undermined agreements made between the two sides in Geneva last month. The journal's Tracy Chu in Singapore has more. The Ministry of Commerce of China said this morning that the U.S. has introduced a number of measures against the country, such as revoking student visas and introducing export control guidelines over AI trips. So this remarks the further tempting optimism

that US China are close to reach some sort of deals. It's not really a surprise, given that the first trade war also has a lot of back and forth policies. We need to see what will go on in the tensions between U.S. and China and if a deal will be reached in 90 days. The office of the U.S. Trade Representative didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

President Trump has said he plans to speak to Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week, part of a push that administration officials hope will ease rising tensions between the sides. Voters in Poland have elected a conservative historian with ties to President Trump as the country's next president. Karel Nowrowski borrowed policy promises from far-right parties in defeating Warsaw's mayor who was seeking closer military cooperation with Europe. Correspondent Thomas Grove in Warsaw says the race drew the largest turnout since Poland shook off communism in 1989 and could have wider ripple effects.

We have somebody in the presidency now who has promised to block Ukraine's ascension to NATO. That's one thing. If we look at the broader picture, Poland is at a place where it now has the third largest military in NATO. It's an incredibly powerful country and increasingly more diplomatically so as well. And so he's going to have a platform to basically advocate and articulate his own foreign policy decisions, which will probably be much more focused on the United States rather than Europe. And as for the global significance of this,

I think it's very important to show that this is a victory for a conservative candidate, especially after elections saw the right wing rejected in Romania and Germany. Ukraine says it's damaged more than 40 Russian warplanes in drone attacks on four military airports deep inside Russia. Officials at Ukraine's intelligence agency say the coordinated bombardment, dubbed Spider's

Web, took 18 months to prepare. The damage is a big blow against Moscow's long-range bomber fleet and marks a significant victory for Ukraine's deep strike program, which uses drones to target crucial materiel on Russia's soil. Russia's defense ministry called the operation a terrorist attack, and Moscow has responded with its own drone and missile attacks inside Ukraine, which come as delegations from both countries are set to meet today in Istanbul for talks aimed at ending the war. Eight people have been injured in downtown Boulder, Colorado, in an attack that the FBI

is investigating as an act of terror against a group advocating for the release of hostages taken from Israel by Hamas. According to authorities, witnesses heard a man yell, free Palestine, as he used a makeshift flamethrower and threw an incendiary device. Police have a suspect in custody who they believe was working alone. Anxiety about violence in the U.S. stemming from the Hamas-Israeli conflict has been high since a man fatally shot two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington last month.

Here was Boulder Police Chief Steve Redfern, courtesy of Denver 7. Our hearts go out to everyone affected today. Here and in Colorado, we understand that this has a ripple effect in many communities, and we are continuing to stand with and support the victims affected today by this attack. In News Moving Markets today, we exclusively report that the Trump administration is expanding its spending review of federal contractors beyond consulting firms to now include 10 technology providers, including Dell and IT firm CDW. That is according to a letter sent by the General Services Administration to 10 companies asking executives to justify their work and find areas to cut.

The U.S. spends more than $80 billion a year on IT products and services. Dell and CDW didn't respond to requests for comment. Asian steel stocks fell today following comments by President Trump that he plans to double tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to 50% starting Wednesday. And we exclusively report that Metta plans to allow brands to fully create and target ads using artificial intelligence by the end of next year. According to people familiar with the matter, brands could present an image of the product they want to promote, along with a budget goal,

with AI creating the entire ad from there, along with deciding on which users to target, and personalizing the ad to specific users based on factors like their location. Advertising accounted for 97% of Meta's overall revenue last year and funds its multibillion-dollar investments in AI chips, data centers, and for training AI models. Coming up, Journal reporter Vicky Guihuang joins us from a major Bitcoin summit in Las Vegas as the crypto industry basks in its newfound sway in Washington, though not everyone

is on board. We've got that story after the break. It's Truck Month at GMC. Tackle the open road with added confidence in a 2025 Sierra 1500 Pro Graphite at 0% financing for up to 72 months. With an available 5.3 liter V8 engine, 20 inch high gloss black painted aluminum wheels, off road suspension with available 2 inch factory installed lift kit, plus a towing capacity of up to 13,200 pounds, you'll be ready for anything this truck month. Truck month is on now. Ask your GMC dealer for details.

What do Vice President J.D. Vance, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. and Trump 2024 campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita have in common? Well, besides their political convictions, they were all speakers at last week's Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas. Journal reporter Vicky Guihuang was there as the crypto industry, long rooted in libertarian ideas and a skepticism of government, showed off its now close embrace of the president.

Vicky, tell us about this shift, the industry really going from being kind of out in the political wilderness to now a major power base in Washington, I think we could say safely. Yeah, we can definitely say it that way. Just at around this time last year, the crypto industry was in a completely different state at the time, even though Bitcoin prices were moving higher after the Bitcoin ETFs were launched in the US. The industry was facing a lot of lawsuits from regulators and the industry was still sort of recovering from the 2022 collapse of FTX. And it was also at around this time that still candidate Trump campaigning for the US presidency started embracing crypto in a very public way that eventually led to him speaking at

the 2024 Bitcoin conference. And since then, it has just pushed the industry into a completely different direction. So now we're here at this year's Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas. It's almost like merging or meeting of the minds between Washington, DC and the crypto industry. Vicky, have there been any growing pains though that come with that? Folks who are maybe a little bit uncertain about being so much in the spotlight in Washington? Yeah, and that's one of the questions we've been asking people about at the conference,

especially those early Bitcoin investors who really got into the industry after the 2008 global financial crisis because they saw it as this decentralized financial asset or technology that helps you sort of avoid the censorship of the government or stay away from Wall Street. And a lot of these people welcome President Trump's embrace of crypto and Bitcoin. Bitcoin is now trading at an all-time high and it has definitely brought this boom to the crypto industry. But some other industry veterans have definitely expressed some skepticism because as President Trump embraces crypto on a public level, his family has also gotten into almost all corners of the crypto industry, including launching a Bitcoin miner, decentralized financial project called World Liberty Financial that launched a stable coin, which is a type of cryptocurrency packed to the US dollar. And President Trump himself launched a meme coin. And this is also an industry that he is in charge of leading

and regulating, setting new rules and laws for. So people see that conflict of interest there. And then people also worry that maybe this asset is being politicized in a way that it's becoming a bit too right wing. So that's some of the concerns out there. And yet I imagine for many of the participants there, it's been hard to ignore the benefits, whether they're regulatory or otherwise of crypto's new sort of centrality on the political agenda. And it looks like there's more to come on that front. Shantel Lee Yeah. And for a lot of the crypto industry,

a lot of industry players definitely feel like they have gone from being this group of outsiders and rebels to part of the mainstream finance and even part of the political conversation. And some people are very proud of it. And they're also just very happy about the fact that President Trump, since he returned to the White House, has really kept or fulfilled a lot of the promises he made on the campaign trail, including establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve and sort of asking Congress to draft up legislation for stable coins and market structures.

And a lot of those things are still in progress right now. But you can tell that a lot of crypto investors and executives are spending more and more time in Washington, DC. They're actively participating in helping drafting the law. And for the first time, the industry is really having a say in DC. So there's definitely a lot of hope among the Bitcoin miners and mining executives that they hope that the president will sort of come up or announce some sort of policies that would favor their operations in the U.S.

I've been speaking to Wall Street Journal reporter Vicky Guhuang. Vicky, thank you so much for the update. Thank you for having me, Luke. And that's it for What's News for this Monday morning. Today's show was produced by Kate Belevent. Our supervising producer was Daniel Bach, and I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. Until then, thanks for listening.