Let me negotiate with China and let Song Yuqi handle their side

Here’s a modest proposal for the next time the U.S. wants to negotiate with China: Let two normal people who interact with the masses handle it.

Instead of letting two world leaders sit across from each other and decide how much economic pain ordinary people should absorb this quarter, America should send me.

China can send Song Yuqi.

There. Problem solved.

I know, I know. Neither one of us is a head of state. We don’t command armies, control a central bank, a trade ministry, a surveillance apparatus, or a military-industrial complex with a press office and a flag pin.

That’s exactly the point.

At least if I sat across from Yuqi, there’s a decent chance the conversation would start with something human. Music, sports, food, travel, how much the media sucks, the absurdity of online mobs, and how the State drags normal people into fights they never asked to join.

That already sounds more productive than watching massive governments treat farmers, workers, small business owners, fans, artists, and families like pawns on a geopolitical chessboard.

The average citizen is not a bargaining chip

The problem with big-state diplomacy isn’t that leaders talk. Talking beats missiles, sanctions, blockades, and chest-thumping press conferences. But when rulers talk, they sound like they own the people underneath them. Even when they feign compassion.

Tariffs become “leverage,” even if consumers pay the price. Export restrictions turn into “strategy,” even though entrepreneurs, workers, and customers absorb the fallout. Military commitments transform into “stability,” even when regular people may get drafted, displaced, taxed, censored, or lied to when the strategy fails.

Dress it up in polished language all you want, but the basic pattern stays the same. Powerful people make a mess, and they hand ordinary people the bill.

That’s why my supposedly unserious proposal has a serious core. Maybe the world would be better off if negotiations included more people who know what it’s like to live outside State power’s protective glass bubble.

Why a sportswriter and a K-pop idol would do better

A sportswriter understands fans.

Not in the fake “we value our community” corporate sense. I mean the actual people in the cheap seats, message boards, comments, tailgates, bars, family living rooms, and group chats where everyone thinks they could fix the team if someone gave them five minutes and a whiteboard.

A K-pop idol understands fans too, only on a global scale. She understands how culture crosses borders faster than governments can regulate it. She also knows how people connect through songs, performances, jokes, clips, livestreams, and shared obsessions long before bureaucrats finish drafting their next “framework.”

Most normal Americans don’t hate normal Chinese people, and most normal Chinese people don’t hate normal Americans. Hell, most people are too busy working, raising kids, chasing dreams, dealing with bills, watching sports, listening to music, and trying to carve out a little happiness before the next State-mandated institution makes their lives harder.

The masses don’t need more rulers using them as props. If anything, they need fewer barriers between them.

This premise works in dystopian fiction

It’s also why the sportswriter/libertarian-meets-K-pop-idol dynamic works so well in Beyond the Lost Horizon.

On paper, Quinn Cozens and Yui Kikuchi should come from completely different worlds. He’s a skeptical American sportswriter with libertarian instincts. She’s a global pop star whose life’s been shaped by cameras, institutions, handlers, and public expectations.

Then the world breaks, and all the grand narratives collapse. Official rescue channels fail, and institutions don’t save anyone. Those polite assumptions about safety, order, and authority burn away.

What remains?

Two human beings trying to survive, trust each other, and figure out what actually matters when the systems that claimed to protect everyone turn out to be useless, predatory, or both.

That’s the story I keep coming back to because it feels truer than the official version of the world.

Check out Beyond the Lost Horizon today and watch the world burn

Normal people understand peace better than politicians

Most people don’t wake up craving a trade war. They also don’t sit around hoping shipping lanes close, supply chains break, prices rise, or some island across the ocean becomes the next flashpoint in a contest between nuclear powers.

Normal people want sane things.

They want food to stay affordable, to keep their kids safe, their work to mean something, to buy what they need, sell what they make, travel if they can, enjoy art, follow sports teams, build families, and not have some distant ruling class — over 1,000 miles away in some cases — turn their lives into collateral damage.

If I negotiated for America, my opening statement would be simple: America’s going to stop punishing normal people for its reckless foreign policy, trade wars, and economic sanctions. 

If Yuqi negotiated for China, I obviously won’t claim to know what she’d say. But I’d think any artist who’s stood in front of real fans across borders would understand something politicians like Donald Trump and Xi Jinping forget: People aren’t abstractions.

They’re not “markets,” “labor pools,” “strategic populations,” or chess pieces.

They’re people who just want to live and be left alone. Something not a single State on the face of this Earth is smart enough to understand. Yet the State thinks it can run an entire country? Come on. 

Trade beats quest for empire

A more libertarian foreign policy doesn’t mean pretending the world’s harmless. Nor does it mean trusting hostile regimes, or singing kumbaya while governments consolidate power.

It means starting from a better moral assumption.

Peaceful exchange beats coercion, voluntary trade crushes managed economic warfare, and self-determination kicks the shit out of great-power bargaining. Normal people shouldn’t suffer because the psychopaths ruling them want leverage.

That’s the mold this whole thing fits.

• Less empire, and more exchange.
• Less chest-thumping, and more conversation.
• And less treating citizens like movable pieces on a board. More respecting their right to live, work, trade, create, worship, speak, travel, and love without getting crushed between competing states.

Let me negotiate with China, and let Yuqi sit across the table

Worst-case scenario? Nothing gets solved, but at least the press conference would be more entertaining than two old, rich men hell-bent on expanding their respective spheres of influence and inflating their own egos.

Best-case scenario? The world remembers something its rulers keep forgetting: The people living under the godforsaken skycloths our governments tell us to worship should matter. Not the godforsaken skycloths themselves.

Catch my backlist at The Rebel Lore Vault for fiction that hits harder than this article