The Times opinion piece on Xi's US visit.
America’s show for Xi won’t mean a great deal
Pageantry will do little to sway China’s president, who has ended his visit with the upper hand. - Cindy Yu
Xi Jinping has been close to the centre of power for most of his life. The second son of the vice-premier Xi Zhongxun, Xi grew up with nannies, chauffeurs driving Soviet cars and a family chef. But then his father was purged, and then came the Cultural Revolution. Between the ages of 15 and 22, Xi lived as a peasant in northwestern China.
It was a ruthless political training that few western politicians can imagine. “What I saw was more than the surface of things. I didn’t just see the power, flowers, glory and applause. I also saw the cowsheds and the fickleness of the world,” he told an interviewer years later. The cowsheds, of course, were the makeshift prison cells that the Red Guards put their victims in.
So I wonder what he thought of the show that President Trump put on for him last week. No doubt he would have welcomed it as a sign that China was finally being seen as an equal by the United States. And yet, it was exactly the kind of pageantry that he has long seen as superficial. If Trump’s hope was to charm the Chinese president into being more pliable, he will soon be disappointed.
It is good for all of us that the two countries are talking: better if the nuclear powers have warm words than daggers drawn. But in diplomacy, pageantry has a purpose. “You use optics as leverage. You use it to get what you want,” Julian Gewirtz, former senior director for China on President Biden’s National Security Council, tells me. So what did Trump get?
His main concern seems to be the trade deficit. “Our farmers are going to be very happy,” he said on Friday. Jamieson Greer, the trade representative, has promised more details this week, but has suggested the deals could include billions of dollars of tariff cuts, for American oil and gas, medical devices and agricultural products to be sold to China. All of this, of course, comes ahead of the midterms, and Trump hopes that he can woo consumers and companies back home.
China threw in a few other sweeteners: tighter controls on fentanyl precursors, access for 100,000 young Americans to study in China and two pandas loaned to Atlanta’s zoo. But there was no breakthrough on trickier issues. Trump got nothing on Iran, whose Shahed drones are made from Chinese dual-use parts and whose strikes on American airbases are reportedly using Chinese satellite imagery. Neither did he get anything concrete on rare earths, where China’s chokehold on supply means that American aerospace and semiconductor companies still don’t have enough. On AI, the two sides agreed to open a hotline but did not set out any more substantive safety measures (though Trump was tickled that Xi called it “super intelligence”).
And even the recent news that some F-35 fighter jet parts had been mysteriously diverted to Hong Kong, en route from Australia to America, failed to derail the summit. The Americans have said little about how concerned they are that potentially highly sensitive military technology is now in Chinese hands. Instead, Trump seemed more concerned with impressing Xi with his new helipad. “He likes granite. He’s an expert on stone, aside from many other things,” Trump swooned.
This might be how real estate deals are done in New York City, but the attempted bromance will do little to sway Xi. Instead, he took Trump’s substance-light approach to push home China’s advantage.
On the first day of the summit, Xi said that he “hopes America will resolutely maintain the correct position of opposing ‘Taiwanese independence’”, according to the Chinese read-out. He knew, of course, that that was not the American position, which has always been to “not support” rather than “oppose” Taiwanese independence. The semantic difference may be tiny, but Xi was trying to shift the goalposts.
David Perdue, the US ambassador to China, has since corrected the record, confirming that the American position has not changed. But Xi would have felt emboldened to make the brazen attempt in light of Trump’s ambivalence towards Taiwan (“the last thing we need right now is a war 9,500 miles away”, Trump had said in May). With the leaders scheduled to have two more meetings this year (for November’s Apec summit and December’s G20), we can expect that Trump will continue to delay the $14bn arms deal to Taiwan that has been sitting on his desk for months.
It’s true that China didn’t get much out of the summit either. It is still restricted from buying the most advanced American chips and it was able to get only a two-month extension to the trade truce, when it had reportedly wanted an extension to last to the end of Trump’s term. Renegotiating by January means that the US still reserves the option of reigniting the trade war.