Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer visited Beijing just before President Donald Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, putting ag trade concerns into the conversation ahead of the summit.
The senator said she pressed Chinese leaders on beef, soybeans and sorghum. “I spoke about agriculture. I spoke about beef markets,” Fischer said in an interview with the Rural Radio Network.
Fischer said the bipartisan delegation included five senators and met with China’s premier, foreign minister and the chairman of the National People’s Congress. The goal, she said, was to keep communication open even as economic and military tensions remain high. “We have to keep those lines of communication open,” she said.
For Nebraska producers, Fischer said the message to Chinese officials was straightforward: Move on stalled market access issues. She said she raised beef registrations with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration, along with soybeans and sorghum. “They need to honor those commitments,” Fischer said of the soybean trade.
The timing came days before Pres. Donald Trump’s May 14-15 summit with Xi where the White House said China agreed to increase purchases of U.S. agricultural products and ease some market access barriers for beef and poultry. The developments tracked closely with the issues Fischer said she carried into Beijing a week earlier.
Fischer said the trip was about more than trade. She called China “an economic powerhouse” that has become a military peer, and said dialogue is necessary to avoid dangerous misunderstandings between two nuclear powers.
That broader strategic tension framed her trip and the summit that followed. She also described the surveillance concerns in blunt terms. Fischer said she left her regular phone and iPad in the United States and traveled with a burner phone.
“We need we need to worry about their surveillance of us,” she said, both in China and Chinese citizens who may try to steal American intellectual property and technology. She said the delegation felt the Chinese were closely watching their every move.
“We had Chinese security around us all the time,” she said. “They were right up in our faces.” She said the experience underscored the risks surrounding surveillance, intellectual property and agricultural technology.
For Nebraska agriculture, the question now is whether summit diplomacy produces lasting export gains.
Fischer said she hopes it does. “Getting these markets open, it’d be a huge, huge win for Nebraska,” she said. “That’s what ag producers are waiting to see happen.”