Boeing has started shipping planes to China again. A 787-9 Dreamliner landed with Juneyao Airlines Saturday, marking what might be—and I stress might be—a meaningful restart of the American aerospace giant's deliveries to its crucial Chinese customers.
Talk about awkward timing, though.
The delivery came just days after a Boeing 787-8 crashed in a fireball after takeoff in India. Nothing quite says "welcome back to our business relationship" like delivering the same aircraft family that just experienced a catastrophic failure elsewhere in the world. But business is business, I suppose.
The resumption isn't exactly surprising. It follows that temporary 90-day scaling back of tariffs between Washington and Beijing announced earlier this month. A brief ceasefire in the economic Cold War that's been raging between the superpowers.
I've been tracking Boeing's China challenges since 2021, and what's most fascinating is how thoroughly the company's delivery schedule has become a diplomatic barometer. Boeing suspended new deliveries to China back in April as Trump-era tariff escalations made the cost prohibitive. Things got so bad they were considering reselling "potentially dozens" of aircraft originally built for Chinese carriers.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Imagine building multimillion-dollar aircraft and then having to find new buyers because some political squabble rendered your original sales agreements economically unviable. It's like preparing Thanksgiving dinner for guests who then get into a fight in your driveway and refuse to come inside. All that turkey, just sitting there...
(Full disclosure: I've had relatives do precisely this, though thankfully not involving commercial aircraft.)
This on-again, off-again delivery dance highlights the increasingly impossible position of multinational corporations caught in great power crossfire. Boeing isn't just selling airplanes; it's navigating a geopolitical obstacle course where a presidential tweet can instantly transform profitable deals into nightmares.
China represents about 10% of Boeing's commercial backlog. That's not just a market—it's a lifeline for a company battered by the 737 MAX crisis, pandemic disruptions, and now fresh safety concerns after the India crash.
The framework agreement covering tariff rates reached in London offers a temporary detente. But temporary is the operative word here. Companies like Boeing are making decades-long investment decisions based on diplomatic agreements that might not survive the next news cycle.
"We're operating on timeframes measured in quarters, while building products designed to last 30 years," a Boeing executive told me last year, speaking on condition of anonymity. "That gap has never been wider."
There's a model I've developed for thinking about this: the impossible triangle of corporate multinationalism. Companies want three things simultaneously: 1) Access to China's market 2) Compliance with U.S. government priorities 3) Predictable business conditions
Pick two. You can't have all three anymore.
The arrival of a 737 MAX in Xiamen Airlines livery earlier this week, followed by this 787-9 delivery, suggests Boeing is cautiously testing waters that remain choppy at best. Are executives in Seattle celebrating these deliveries or eyeing the 90-day tariff pause with trepidation?
Look, the most revealing aspect here isn't about Boeing specifically. It's what this tells us about economic interdependence as a stabilizing force in international relations. The old theory was that deep economic ties would make conflict too costly. What we're seeing instead? Economic relationships have become weaponized tools rather than constraints.
For Boeing, caught in this messy web, each delivery represents not just a transaction but a brief window of diplomatic alignment.
Which seems... problematic... for a company already struggling with engineering and safety challenges of its own making.
