• G7.Trump tries to lower the tension of the trade war and warns China: "It has no other choice"

Xi Jinping, president of some 1.3 billion Chinese people, has been in the commercial uprising lately with his American counterpart, Donald Trump. However, both share an unusual love for the Midwest, the American heartland .

For Trump, this agricultural region, often despised as a land of paletos by the progressive US intelligence , is its largest barn of votes ; In addition, the state of Iowa, perhaps the deepest of this abyss of Americanity, is often key in the elections due to the strange American political machinery.

For Xi Jinping, however, Iowa is something else. A dream of fullness, of the future, of idealized youth.

In 1985, the famines caused by Maoism still fresh, the now Chinese president was only a modest 33-year-old civil servant embarked on an extraordinary mission. As part of the opening policy undertaken by Deng Xiaoping, he had been sent to the US to find out in situ the agricultural strategy of capitalism as fierce as it was feraz . The great American enemy had something to teach the comrades, after all.

Terry Branstad, then governor of Iowa and today a brand new American ambassador to Beijing, knew how to watch the play and entrusted his accommodation to the friendly Dvorchak family. Gary, the firstborn, was entertaining venturing at the university, so Xi could occupy his bedroom, adorned with American football posters, Star Wars figurines and everything necessary, in short, to fall in love with the American way of life .

Completed his immersion in neoliberal agriculture, Xi had to return to the motherland to continue building totalitarian communist capitalism, that only possible oxymoron in the land of Taoism - the union of opposites, etc. - but left part of his heart between the infinite sown of the Midwest. Would I ever go back?

More than 30 years later, the response germinated at Rick Kimberley's farm , the last stop on a trip organized by the Corteva company for journalists from around the world. After weighing the advantages of seeds, insecticides and new technologies applied to agriculture marketed by Corteva, Rick told the audience a memorable story.

For Trump, Iowa is a vote barn. For the Chinese president, it is a dream of fullness, of idealized youth

It was 2012 when Vice President Xi Jjinping decided to tour the United States. Iowa, of course, could not miss in his journey. Although he maintained contact with the Dvorchak -Gary family, without going any further, he has more than claimed the purr of his bedroom becoming a thriving business consultant in Beijing-, Xi wanted to step on a typical farm in the region again. Perhaps because of the proximity to Des Moines, where the international airport is, it went to Rick's. There, he returned to enjoy the human warmth of the Midwest and was even encouraged to take a ride on one of the tractors made in the USA .

Rick's gift of people finished sealing the unexpected connection between Iowa and the People's Republic. The Midwestern state exports more soybeans to China than to all other countries in the world together, apart from corn, pork and beef. In 1996, it sold goods to the Chinese for about $ 25 million; Two decades later, the figure had risen to 49 million.

After the flashback , in a less favorable present, Rick showed us his concern about the fashion of converting tariffs on agriculture into a geopolitical weapon. Trump stuff ... About to turn 70, he keeps fit. Well planted, tanned skin, held stoic in the sun while journalists sought the shadow, some even used a sack of corn to sit the urban innkeepers. When the world press threatened collapse, Rick's wife - "the boss" , according to him - came to the rescue to invite us to move into his home, comfortable and spacious, but without apparent luxuries.

Xi's photo on Rick's tractor and memories of his trips to China mixed in the living room with the austere furniture and family photos . When a seasoned journalist asked him about the main challenge that an American farmer has to face, Rick quickly drew: «Politicians. He put them all in a room and ... ». "... And he threw the key," the boss cut off, before he trampled on political correctness like a weed.

Many of their neighbors support Trump's attacks on China, aware that they are threatened by their pockets. "Someone has to stop them," one of them explained the day before. Rick acknowledged that the Chinese have "problems with intellectual property," which frightens, for example, "companies like John Deere," just the manufacturer of the tractor that drives Xi in the photo. «They know that they are going to copy them there to sell more or less the same with another name and cheaper».

He was also aware of his different perception of politics. From the five-generation Kimberley watchtower of American farmers proud of their independence and freedom, watch astonished how thousands of Chinese tourists pilgrimage to their farm to contemplate the sacred ground by their leader's feet.

Nevertheless, the experience accumulated in his 18 trips to China has convinced him that the farmers there are not so different. And the differences can be polished. In the province of Hebei, northeast of Beijing, a replica of Rick's farm is being built to serve as a model for Chinese farmers , and the Kimberley School of Agricultural Business, of which Rick is now working in Shaanxi honorary dean.

In Iowa - cradle of John Wayne, by the way - you can be sowing the principle of a complex friendship between China and the United States.

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