U.S. President Donald Trump meets and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in June, 2019.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Hours after U.S. President Donald Trump bemoaned how “extremely hard” it is to make a deal with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, the two leaders had a long-awaited phone call that seemed to confirm this assessment, with Beijing offering little while winning several apparent concessions from Washington.
Even as he launched an all-out trade war against China, Mr. Trump repeatedly said he wanted to speak with Mr. Xi personally, all the while making it clear that he expected the Chinese leader to reach out to him, not the other way around.
A Chinese readout of Thursday’s conversation, however, noted pointedly that it was Mr. Xi who “took a phone call” from Mr. Trump, soon after an all-caps post by the U.S. President on social media in which he described Mr. Xi as “VERY TOUGH, AND EXTREMELY HARD TO MAKE A DEAL WITH!!!”
While Beijing has many reasons for wanting to tamp down trade tensions, Mr. Xi has shown that he is willing to wait for Mr. Trump to blink, confident – at least outwardly – that the Chinese economy can weather the pain better than the U.S. can.
The U.S. and China paused most tariffs against each other after discussions last month in Geneva, but progress appeared to stall soon afterward, with both sides accusing the other of breaching their tenuous agreement. At the very least, another round of talks will likely further delay the worst U.S. tariffs against China as Beijing seeks to rebalance its economy away from reliance on the U.S. market.
Mr. Xi also appeared to win a concession on the issue of student visas, with a Chinese readout quoting Mr. Trump as saying “the U.S. loves to have Chinese students coming to study in America.”
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The readout also claimed Mr. Trump promised to “honour the one-China policy,” an agreement over the status of Taiwan that Beijing and Washington have massively differing interpretations of. The U.S. holds that there is only one China, governed from Beijing, while the status of democratic Taiwan is undecided. Beijing regards the “One China policy,” which it aggressively pushes on other countries, as an endorsement of its territorial claims to Taiwan.
Mr. Trump did not mention Taiwan in any of his social media posts about the call Thursday, saying it had “focused almost entirely on TRADE.” And he, too, brought up an issue that was missing in the other party’s readout: rare earths.
China controls a huge swath of the global supply of rare earths – vital for most modern technologies – and has moved to restrict exports to the U.S. in retaliation for U.S. tariffs. This has greatly alarmed Washington and has been a key priority for trade negotiators, leading to complaints that Beijing wasn’t following through on agreements made in Geneva.
Mr. Trump said after his conversation with Mr. Xi that “there should no longer be any questions respecting the complexity of Rare Earth products.” But the topic was entirely missing from Chinese accounts of the call, and it is unclear what kind of deal was reached, if any.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi confronted weeks of brewing trade tensions and a battle over critical minerals in a rare leader-to-leader call on Thursday.
Reuters
Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the non-partisan Foundation for Defence of Democracies, said Mr. Xi appeared to have finally conceded to holding a call with Mr. Trump “as a low‑cost way to forestall, however temporarily, harsher U.S. competitive actions coming down the pike.
“The embarrassment risk for Xi here is minimal; the payoff is extra breathing room in a contest Beijing expects to drag on for years,” he added.
While in the U.S. the call was quickly overshadowed by Mr. Trump’s escalating feud with Elon Musk, coverage of it continued to lead state-run media in China on Friday and painted Mr. Xi as having the upper hand.
“The fact that the latest call between the two leaders took place at the request of the U.S. side indicates that China holds the initiative and reflects growing anxiety in Washington,” Lü Xiang, research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.
Wu Xinbo, the director of the Centre for American Studies at Fudan University, agreed, saying in an interview that the U.S. appeared to be struggling with reorganizing supply chains away from China since Mr. Trump’s tariff barrage.
“Many factories, whether for cars or airplanes, are on the verge of shutting down, so Trump is under pressure and must talk with China,” Prof. Wu said, adding that China, too, has been “quite concerned about the recent sharp divergence in China-U.S. relations” and wants to ease tensions.
However, he noted, Beijing has “won the first stage of the game,” at the talks in Geneva, and demonstrated that “our ability to withstand pressure is somewhat stronger than that of the U.S.”
With reports from Alexandra Li