Welcome back to The Restricted Handling Podcast, your daily high-octane brief for the national security crowd — where geopolitics meets adrenaline. Today’s episode, “RH 10.30.25 | China: Trump-Xi Truce, Chip Wars, PLA Purge, and Taiwan Heat,” dives straight into one of the most dramatic 24 hours in U.S.-China relations this year.

President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping finally sat down in Busan, South Korea, for what was billed as the summit that could “reset globalization.” Instead, we got a fragile handshake truce: tariffs down ten points, rare earth curbs delayed for a year, and promises of big soybean and energy buys that may or may not materialize. The deal? More a timeout than a turning point.

We unpack the details of the Trump-Xi trade agreement — the numbers, the loopholes, and the optics. Why is Beijing playing it cool? What’s the real value of that one-year grace period on rare earth exports? And what’s with Trump calling the meeting “a twelve out of ten”? We’re cutting through the noise to tell you what actually matters for Washington, Wall Street, and the world.

Then we pivot to the tech war, where the star of the show — Nvidia’s “Blackwell” AI chip — somehow didn’t make it into the conversation. Trump teased it, the markets reacted, and then he said, “We’re not talking about Blackwell.” We’ll break down why that decision might be the smartest (or dumbest) non-move of the week.

Meanwhile in Beijing, the plot thickens. The “Purge Plenum” continues to rattle China’s military, with nearly two-thirds of the People’s Liberation Army’s Central Committee missing in action. Xi promoted his top anti-corruption enforcer to vice chair of the Central Military Commission — a power play that screams control, not confidence. Combine that with the PLA’s own public “self-critique” about “deficiencies” in combat readiness, and you’ve got a leadership struggling to keep its boots on the ground.

And don’t miss the Taiwan update — from Beijing’s legal intimidation campaign against an elected lawmaker to China’s propaganda victory lap over delayed F-16 fighter deliveries. Plus, we zoom out to Europe and South Korea, where allies are recalibrating fast as the great-power rivalry keeps shifting under their feet.

It’s fast, sharp, and impossible to ignore — today’s Restricted Handling rundown on China’s truce, tech, turmoil, and tension.

Tune in, subscribe, and share. This is not your average foreign policy podcast — this is Restricted Handling.