Trump, Xi and the bid for a ‘grand bargain’ between superpowers
As the US president prepares to visit Beijing, America no longer holds all the cards — but China knows it must tread carefully
Joe Leahy in Beijing and Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Three years ago, US-China ties were at a low point following a series of diplomatic disputes and concern about possible conflict over Taiwan.
The Biden administration decided to pull out all the stops to try to build a rapport between the US president and his counterpart Xi Jinping, hoping that personal contact might stabilise relations even as it implemented tough measures such as export controls.
The Chinese leader, who was visiting San Francisco that November for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum, agreed to a bilateral summit at the nearby lavish Filoli country estate (once the set for the TV series Dynasty).
When Joe Biden greeted his guest at the door, he showed him a snapshot on his phone of a younger Xi taken at the Golden Gate Bridge 38 years earlier.
The normally taciturn Xi looked pleased.
Xi also grinned when Biden complimented the Chinese leader’s Hongqi, a commanding Mao-era retro limousine shipped in especially from China, and compared it with his own “Beast”, the heavily armoured presidential Cadillac.
But according to Sarah Beran, the top White House China adviser at the time, the bonhomie gave way to awkwardness during a one-on-one walk in the garden, with the pair apparently barely talking as they strolled through the manicured lawns.
“The goal was to show that the relationship had stabilised,” she says.
“But ironically, the desire to capture the two presidents alone in the photo meant that no interpreters were with the leaders, and they couldn’t actually speak to each other.”
The air of cordiality was tarnished further after Xi left, when a journalist asked Biden if his departing guest was a dictator.
“Well, look, he is,” Biden replied, prompting a visible wince from his secretary of state Antony Blinken.
In the end, both sides wanted stability and the trip achieved its objectives.
But it revealed once again just how critical these personal ties between the leaders of the two countries can be in determining the direction of the bilateral relationship.
Next week, the importance of this will be on display again when Donald Trump, who regularly boasts of his own close connection with his Chinese counterpart, embarks on a two-day visit to Beijing.
He will arrive at a time when the US and China are competing for dominance in trade and technology as well as global influence.
Last October, Xi and Trump met in South Korea and agreed to a truce in their trade war, with the US unwinding tariffs that had hit 145 per cent after Beijing squeezed the supply to the US of critical minerals needed to manufacture high-tech products.
China’s ability to counter the US tariff onslaught marked an important moment in the strategic competition between rising superpower and incumbent hegemon — shattering the image of an omnipotent US.
“It’s certainly not the case that the US, as our president likes to put it, holds all the cards.
That era is gone, I would say for ever,” says Victor Shih, a professor of Chinese political economy at the University of California, San Diego.
Some US officials say both sides are now pursuing “strategic stability” to buy time to work on their weak spots — including rare earths for the US and semiconductors for China.
But others have disparagingly dubbed it “strategic deference” on the part of the US, and worry that Washington is abrogating its role in securing the world order against growing authoritarianism led by Xi and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
American allies in Asia are especially anxious that Trump — who at that encounter with Xi in October described the Chinese president as “a friend of mine, really for a long time now” — might concede ground on regional security, especially on Taiwan, which Beijing regards as its territory.
Trump has at times seemed ambivalent about Taiwan despite its importance to the US and its allies as a strategic bulwark in the western Pacific and its dominance of the advanced semiconductor industry.
If Trump can convince Xi to continue the trade truce and make large purchases of American agricultural products, these would be “important accomplishments”, says Nick Burns, former US ambassador to China under Biden and now a professor at Harvard Kennedy School.
“In the current Chinese system, Xi Jinping is all-powerful and makes all the most important decisions.
Meeting him face to face is very much in the US interest,” Burns says.
But he expresses concern “that the Chinese will try to convince the president to agree to a significant change in US policy towards Taiwan.
It would be a major, historic miscalculation for President Trump to do so.”
Personal meetings between sitting US presidents and Chinese leaders are a relatively recent phenomenon.
The first face-to-face encounter came only in 1943, when Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist leader in China, met Franklin D Roosevelt in Cairo to discuss the war against Japan and the future of Asia.
Nearly 20 years later, Dwight Eisenhower met Chiang in Taipei — becoming the only sitting US president to visit Taiwan, where the nationalists fled after their civil war defeat in 1949 by the Communists.
By far the most consequential postwar meeting was that between Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon in 1972.
“That visit, first and foremost, established a certain level of strategic trust between two leaders,” says Wu Xinbo, dean at the Institute of International Studies of Fudan University in Shanghai.
“They built extraordinary chemistry quickly, not because of common values but because through personal dialogue they understood their goals were complementary,” says Dennis Wilder, a former CIA China expert who was the top White House Asia adviser to President George W Bush in 2005 and 2006.
Nixon and Mao were able to negotiate mutually acceptable positions on Taiwan and lay out a blueprint for formal US diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China.
“All my parents’ generation remember Nixon’s visit,” says Wang Yuanchong, an expert on US-China history at the University of Delaware.
“Anti-US imperialism was a part of your everyday life and suddenly the American president showed up in Beijing.
That was really a shocking moment.”
Summits followed in 1979 between Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping and between Ronald Reagan and Deng in 1984, further expanding economic ties.
Deng by then had launched his market reforms and Reagan was convinced that China would embrace American-style capitalism, not to mention, eventually, democracy and individualism.
From there, the relationship entered the high point of “engagement”, but always with reminders of the brittleness under the surface, including the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the 1999 US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
During the Tiananmen massacre, George HW Bush, the only president to have previously served as the head of the US diplomatic mission in Beijing, experienced first-hand the opacity of the Chinese system and the limits of personal outreach with leaders in Beijing.
Despite Bush having cultivated Deng for years, the Chinese paramount leader did not return his phone calls.
Bush had thought their “friendship might offer some advantage in tempering Beijing’s fury against its pro-democracy protesters”, wrote Jeffrey Engel, the editor of The China Diary of George HW Bush, the former president’s account of his days in Beijing.
“Deng refused all such overtures, to Bush’s great frustration.”
In 2005, George W Bush visited Hu Jintao in Beijing, wanting to focus on human rights and religious freedom.
Bush insisted on being photographed going to church in China, where religion is strictly controlled by the atheist Communist Party.
The president visited one of the city’s five officially recognised Protestant churches, but an argument broke out, says Wilder, when he realised that the real parishioners could not find seats because they had all been taken by plainclothes Chinese security agents.
“May God bless the Christians of China,” Bush wrote in the visitors’ book.
. . . and the US president at the Gangwashi Church in Beijing © AFP via Getty ImagesHu Jintao reciprocated by visiting Bush in Washington in 2006.
But he had trouble sleeping because of the din nearby from protesters belonging to the Falun Gong, a spiritual group banned in China as subversive.
To add insult to injury, a Falun Gong member somehow got into the White House during the visit and the US side mistakenly introduced the Chinese national anthem as that of the Republic of China — the government in Taiwan.
During the Barack Obama years, the relationship grew more complicated as the US tried to “pivot” to Asia to contain a more assertive China.
Beijing was becoming increasingly confident about its system after its economy fared relatively well in the 2008 global financial crisis.
In 2014, Obama visited Xi in China for Apec and raised concerns about China’s growing military activities in the East China Sea and South China Sea, where it was building artificial islands to strengthen its territorial claims.
“China was unhappy with the Asia pivot and Obama and Xi had a frank discussion about the anxieties that Chinese activities [were] generating throughout Asia,” says Evan Medeiros, Obama’s former top adviser on the Asia-Pacific.
He recalls that Obama and Xi dined in Zhongnanhai, the elite leaders’ secretive compound beside the Forbidden City.
“It was super-fancy and intimate.”
The following year, Xi launched his Made in China 2025 industrial programme aimed at moving his country up the technological ladder into chips, machine tools and other areas.
Its mercantilist targets for global market share angered western partners as anti-free trade.
Standing beside Obama in the White House Rose Garden that year, Xi declared that “China does not intend to pursue militarisation” of the South China Sea, but then proceeded to do exactly that, deploying military assets on its reclamation projects.
Then came Trump, inviting Xi to his Mar-a-Lago resort in early 2017, where he famously served the Chinese president “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you’ve ever seen” while simultaneously informing him that the US was bombing Syria.
During a trip to Beijing in late 2017, Xi and first lady Peng Liyuan treated Trump and US first lady Melania to a personal tour of the Forbidden City.
No foreign head of state had dined with a Chinese president in the former imperial palace since 1949.
But the pandemic scuppered the budding relationship that had emerged despite trade tensions, as Trump blamed China for Covid.
The relationship during Biden’s first years was marred by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and a Chinese spy balloon that crossed North America.
Burns, the former ambassador, recalls that China kept tight control over any encounters between the presidents, insisting on planning them to the last detail months ahead.
“That meant there was very little spontaneity when the two leaders sat down and little room on the Chinese side to hash out differences.”
Starting with Reagan, the US had thought it could manage its differences with Beijing using the World Trade Organization and other mechanisms of the American-led postwar order to grow together, says Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“But we lost faith in these mechanisms, and China, as it got more powerful, decided to lean more heavily into state intervention.”
In that sense, the Trump era, in which the US is now even pursuing some of the same industrial policies as Beijing to promote its own version of self-reliance, is the true “bookend” of those Reaganite aspirations, Kennedy says.
As Trump prepares to visit Beijing, he will be hoping that he can secure highly visible diplomatic “wins” to take home, such as sales of Boeings and soyabeans, and perhaps a new “board of trade” to try to tackle the two countries’ commercial conflicts.
“The kind of personal dynamic between the two, and Trump’s subjective experience of this visit, are so important for everything else in the US-China relations because both leaders are the critical decision makers in their respective foreign policies,” says Neil Thomas, an expert on Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
But Trump will encounter a more confident China this time.
Despite its many economic problems, ranging from a property crash, youth unemployment and demographic decline, the country’s leaders think they have the measure of the US on trade and export controls.
“My impression is that Trump has undergone a learning curve on China . . .
After several rounds of wrestling with China, he began to realise that it is a more powerful and more formidable adversary than he had thought,” says Wu of Fudan University.
According to another Chinese scholar in Beijing, who declined to be named, “Beijing worries less now about actions by the Trump administration.
China has more tools in the box to respond.”
But he says Xi probably wanted to foster the relationship with Trump, believing that the US president is less hawkish on China-related security issues than most experts in Washington — and many of his own officials — and might willingly make concessions on critical issues.
Some believe that Trump will be hoping for deals on trade and Chinese help with Iran.
“THE G2 WILL BE CONVENING SHORTLY!” Trump posted last year before their South Korea meeting.
Shih of the University of California says China’s hand in the negotiations could be strengthened by its influence over Tehran, as it is the biggest buyer of Iranian oil.
“Maybe they’re going to ask for some kind of Taiwan-related concessions and then they’ll really tell the Iranians to stop it,” Shih says.
Chinese officials want Trump, for instance, to change US language on Taiwan to say that Washington “opposes Taiwanese independence”.
US officials have stressed that American policy on Taiwan has not changed, but Trump has a record of saying things to Xi that previous presidents would not have said.
The FT reported in 2019 that Trump told Xi when the two leaders attended the G20 in Osaka that the US would tone down criticism of Beijing’s approach to Hong Kong following big pro-democracy protests in the territory.
The offer was designed to help revive talks during the trade war of Trump’s first term.
Others argue that the US policy should continue to emphasise American values — such as human rights — which have largely been dropped under Trump.
“If President Trump is silent on the many human rights violations of the Chinese government — in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, continued crackdowns on religious rights — that will be victory for the Communist Party,” says Burns, the former ambassador, adding that Trump should push for the release of Jimmy Lai, the imprisoned Hong Kong media baron.
Whatever happens, Drew Thompson, senior fellow at Singapore’s S Rajaratnam School of International Studies and a former Pentagon official, warns that Beijing will still have to tread carefully with Trump.
“Trump . . . thrives on disinformation and chaos, which of course Xi Jinping does not,” he says.
He adds that the personal chemistry between the presidents would probably not override the long-term competitive structural direction of the relationship, with Xi having just locked in a 15th five-year plan focused on using industrial policy to beat the west in advanced technologies, while the US is looking to AI and semiconductors to maintain its global dominance.
“Personalities matter, but only at the margins,” says Christopher Johnson, a former senior CIA China analyst now chief executive of China Strategies Group.
“Trump fancies himself the architect of a ‘grand bargain’ with China that cements his place in history.
For Xi, it’s about buying time to fully decouple from the west and supplant its role in the global advanced manufacturing supply chain.”
Trump could still make history in one sense, however.
He has said he expects “President Xi will give me a big, fat, hug when I get there” for “opening” the Strait of Hormuz.
That would definitely be a first for a US president, and would mean he has joined a truly exclusive club.
The reserved Chinese leader normally saves his hugs for Putin.
Joe Leahy is the FT’s Beijing bureau chief. Demetri Sevastopulo is US-China correspondent
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