New Delhi, May 20 -- Last week, US President Donald Trump's historic two-day meeting with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, the first in Beijing at this level since 2017, ended without a commercial breakthrough despite the presence of a high-powered technology delegation of 17 American CEOs, including Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jensen Huang of Nvidia.

China did not respond to US overtures, including the potential sale of Nvidia's cutting-edge H200 chips to Chinese entities that the Joe Biden administration had blocked and Trump administration reversed.

US officials dismissed a lack of business progress as immaterial. Markets disagreed. The absence of a high-technology purchase package, despite the delegation theatrics, exposed a rare crack in th...