Impact Without Borders: Notes from the 2026 CINGS Annual Summit
53 CINGS members, including 20 new members of the 2026 cohort, recently gathered in Connecticut for our CINGS 2026 Annual Summit. It was our largest turnout to date. But the number that mattered more was how many conversations kept going long after the formal sessions ended, spilling into coffee-fueled group chats that stayed abuzz well into late-night KTV.
The summit's theme was Impact Without Borders: Fostering U.S.-China Partnerships for Progress. Across four sessions covering AI policy, cross-border business and media, healthcare investment, and the preservation of cultural heritage, one question kept resurfacing: how do we read each other accurately, build trust, and drive impact when the dominant narrative on both sides rewards enmity?
Samm Sacks, Senior Fellow at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center, opened the day with an insightful reframing of the U.S.-China AI relationship. The session was thoughtfully moderated by CINGS' Shuang Liang and Angelo Saraceno
The dominant frame around U.S.-China AI is a contest for technological dominance with national security as the stakes. Samm added the nuance that this is one layer of a far more integrated reality, and the deeper layer offers shimmers of hope. Scholars, engineers, civil society researchers, and ordinary citizens in both countries are working through the same questions about how AI should be governed, deployed, and trusted.
The conventional Western view treats China's AI governance as primarily an instrument of state control. Samm offered a more granular and technical read. On data privacy, algorithmic accountability, and the emerging frontier of agentic AI — systems that act autonomously on a user's behalf — China is moving quickly with pragmatic, iterative approaches across the public and private sectors.
The policy trajectory in both capitals is pushing the two ecosystems further apart. Export controls, outbound investment screening, and a Chinese retaliatory framework are all hardening the wall. The technical questions, meanwhile, pull researchers in both countries toward the same problems: how to make AI safe, protect user data, and keep agentic systems aligned with human intent.
The call is for targeted collaborations. Not a return to an overly interdependent era of a decade ago, but a deliberate identification of seams that geopolitics has not yet captured: AI safety for future generations, environmental impact, ethical standards for autonomous systems, and more. Areas where the cost of decoupling is high and strategic sensitivity is, for now, low. The window to act on them is narrowing; civil society and communities like CINGS have a role in maintaining the discourse and paving paths toward actions. "
Session Two: Reading the Signals, with Ivy Yang, Rosa Zhang, David Weeks, and Muyi Xiao
The second session, moderated by CINGS' Ivy Yang , was a working diagnosis of what cross-border business, culture, and media actually look like in 2026.
Rosa Qi Zhang, founder of Queue Agency, made the case that politics is a tax on Chinese companies entering the U.S. market, but not a verdict. Her clients, many from Shenzhen, Hangzhou, and other manufacturing and tech hubs, are growing well in the U.S. despite the headwinds. The reason is unglamorous: a relentless product-first orientation. The companies that win are the ones whose product quality is so high that the political conversation becomes secondary. She invoked the Chinese phrase 危中有机 — "within danger, there is opportunity" — as operational discipline rather than platitude. Constraints force better products, and good products win consumers.
David Weeks , co-founder and COO of Sunrise International, traced a structural shift in how Chinese B2B founders approach global expansion. A growing share is now international-first: they build for overseas markets from day one rather than treating global expansion as a phase-two question. The pull is partly the prestige of U.S. capital and U.S. media — a quote in TechCrunch or a top-tier U.S. investor on the cap table still opens doors elsewhere in the world. The push is the saturation of the Chinese domestic market: thin margins, brutal competition, and for many B2B companies, a path to profitability that runs through somewhere else. David also flagged a recurring expectations gap on the marketing side: Chinese companies might be international-first, but they still see PR through a local lens. B2B clients are accustomed to short-term transactional relationships with journalists rather than building organic relationships over time. Much of the work is recalibrating what a Western PR strategy is actually for: thought leadership, investor signaling, talent recruitment, rather than just direct lead generation.
Muyi Xiao Xiao, Senior Fellow at Asia Society and former visual investigations journalist at The New York Times, named the harder problem underneath all of this — and pointed to where the rebuilding is happening. The infrastructure for telling nuanced China stories has changed. She has little nostalgia for legacy formats, only enthusiasm for new storytelling opportunities.She’s collaborating with seasoned China watchers to help journalists and independent creators who speak directly to audiences on social media, putting informed Chinese journalistic voices back in front of viewers.
The thread across the three panelists: trust is the scarce resource in U.S.-China cross-border work right now, and the people rebuilding it are doing so through products, relationships, and thoughtful storytelling.
Session Three: James Zhao on Bridging Healthcare Innovation Between the U.S. and China
James Zhao , Founding Partner of LYFE Capital, sat down for a fireside chat moderated by CINGS’ Kenny Chen, CFA, CAIA on what leadership looks like when building across markets, cultures, and innovation ecosystems. Drawing on his own journey as a cross-border entrepreneur, James reflected on the founding of LYFE as an effort to build not only an investment platform but an institution capable of connecting healthcare companies with global markets, supply chains, strategic partners, and talent across the United States and Asia.
James’ central message was that healthcare innovation depends on leaders who can see beyond borders. Breakthrough science, clinical development, manufacturing capability, patient access, and commercialization often sit in different parts of the world. The United States remains a leading source of scientific discovery and entrepreneurial energy, while China and broader Asia have become increasingly important centers of development capacity, operational execution, and healthcare innovation. Effective leadership means understanding how these strengths can complement one another responsibly.
A recurring theme was the evolution of China’s healthcare landscape from scale and efficiency toward more sophisticated innovation. James emphasized that cross-border value is not created by capital alone, but by the ability to translate between markets, build trust, identify the right partners, and help teams execute across different systems. In a more complex geopolitical environment, that leadership requires sharper judgment, stronger governance, and a disciplined understanding of where collaboration can still create meaningful progress.
For younger entrepreneurs hoping to build bridges between the U.S. and China, James’ advice was grounded and direct: take responsibility for decisions, understand both sides deeply, and build teams around a shared vision. His reflections were ultimately less about transactions than about leadership: the patience to build institutions, the courage to make difficult calls, and the conviction to keep advancing healthcare innovation in ways that serve patients across borders.
The summit closed with a presentation from our co-founder and President Emeritus Annie Liang-Zhou — currently completing her master's in historic preservation at the University of Pennsylvania — alongside Dr. Hunghsi Chao , Senior Regional Director of East Asia at the World Monuments Fund.
Their conversation was a deliberate counterweight to the rest of the day. Where the earlier sessions focused on rapidly evolving systems — AI policy, media platforms, capital flows — this one zoomed out to a longer time horizon. Dr. Chao walked through WMF's 25-year conservation of the Qianlong Emperor's Garden in Beijing's Forbidden City, the establishment of WMF's first legally registered China office in 2024, and the inclusion of two new Chinese grotto sites, Yungang in Shanxi and Maijishan in Gansu, on the 2025 World Monuments Watch.
Annie reflected on what drew her into preservation work and on the broader role of cultural heritage in U.S.-China relations. Some of the most durable bridges between the two countries are not built in headlines or policy documents. They are built in stone, in craft traditions passed across generations, in the slow work of recovering techniques that nearly disappeared. Cultural heritage is a cross-border infrastructure, and it operates on a timescale that outlasts any administration.
It was the right note to end on, with hope and aspirations, and a reminder of the historical significance of this work and how much of it still needs to be done.
To the 2026 cohort: welcome. You are joining at a moment when this work matters more than ever.
The people doing the actual work of U.S.-China collaboration see more convergence than the dominant narrative allows for. CINGS is built around community. By forming and facilitating people-to-people connections, we create a space where members speak candidly about what they're seeing, build the relationships that make nuanced conversation possible, and carry that nuance into action — through their work, through their philanthropy, through how they show up in their own networks.
To the speakers, members, and the CINGS executive committee that made the weekend possible: thank you. The community shows up because you do.
More to come!
