U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with Chinese President Xi Jinping after a visit to Zhongnanhai Garden on Friday in Beijing.China Pool/Getty Images
The great thing about low expectations is they’re easy to exceed.
Coming out of this week’s long-awaited summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, both sides can claim some measure of success: They avoided any major blow up, made some minor progress on trade (“fantastic deals,” according to Mr. Trump), and got to grandstand on Taiwan and Iran, despite not winning any concessions from the other side.
Mr. Trump, a master of claiming credit even when it’s not due, would argue otherwise, of course. But while a White House readout of their meeting Thursday touted Mr. Xi’s “opposition to the militarization of the Strait” of Hormuz, or Iran getting a nuclear weapon, both are longstanding Chinese positions, as is a supposedly new promise not to supply Iran with weapons, which Beijing has previously denied doing.
(“China’s position on the Iran situation is very clear,” the country’s Foreign Ministry said Friday. “There is no point in continuing this conflict which should not have happened in the first place.”)
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Similarly, a Chinese readout focusing on stern words from Mr. Xi on the issue of Taiwan – the self-ruled democracy China claims and has threatened to annex by force – was merely business as usual, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“U.S. policy on the issue of Taiwan is unchanged as of today and as of the meeting that we had here today,” he said Thursday. “It was raised; they always raise it on their side, we always make clear our position, and we move on.”
While both sides can be pleased with the Beijing summit, China emerged as the winner almost by default. By dint of their being guests, it was easy for Chinese media to present the U.S. side as supplicants, focusing on video of Mr. Rubio apparently dazzled by the Great Hall of the People, or Mr. Trump raving about the roses at Zhongnanhai, the secretive Chinese government compound where Mr. Xi hosted him Friday.
“President Trump called President Xi a great leader and China a great country, saying that the U.S. and China are the most important and most powerful countries in the world,” the state-run Global Times said in an editorial. “The U.S. side’s more objective and equal approach toward China reflects the underlying logic behind the ‘new positioning’ of China-U.S. relations.”
Importantly for China, the two sides extended a trade truce agreed by the two leaders in South Korea last October, and set dates for further meetings this year: one in the U.S. in September, and another in November when China hosts the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit. This will buy Beijing significant time to further shore up its economy ahead of any future trade hostilities with the U.S.
Writing Thursday, Rush Doshi, a former adviser to president Joe Biden on China, said “Beijing appears to me to wish to lock in a ‘truce’ favourable to them, and they want to do so beyond Trump.”
He predicted Beijing may seek to frame any future disputes on trade as breaching the “new vision of building a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability” agreed to by Mr. Trump at this week’s summit.
Yu Tiejun, dean of Peking University’s Institute of International and Strategic Studies, said “over the past year in particular, amid ongoing trade tensions, I believe President Trump can no longer treat this relationship as something he can simply ignore or alter on a whim.”
“Both sides are likely to handle economic disputes in a more rational and pragmatic manner,” he told The Globe and Mail. “In that sense, the risk of sudden, drastic shifts on Trump’s side after he leaves Beijing, remains low. Because this summit paved the way for a smooth development.”
Mr. Trump’s fondness for effusive, off-the-cuff language also redounded to China’s benefit, with state media happy to quote him calling Mr. Xi a “great leader,” speaking of bringing U.S. business leaders with him to show “respect” and extolling the beauty of Beijing and its people. Even when Mr. Xi appeared to criticize the U.S., Mr. Trump reframed it on Truth Social as “very elegantly” capturing the alleged decline wrought on the country by Mr. Biden – and reversed by Mr. Trump.
“We’ve settled a lot of different problems that other people wouldn’t have been able to settle, and the relationship is a very strong one,” Mr. Trump said Friday.
By contrast, Mr. Xi gave few compliments, and his remarks stuck to his typical rehearsed, grandiose metre: It’s hard to imagine Mr. Trump referencing the Second Peloponnesian War, for example, as Mr. Xi did in warning against the “Thucydides Trap” (the concept that an established power will always be threatened by and come into conflict with a rising power).
To be sure, one good meeting does not a strong bilateral relationship make: Mr. Trump was similarly full of praise after he travelled to Beijing in 2017 – he subsequently launched a trade war that sent relations with China into a deep freeze from which they are only now emerging.
China is far stronger than it was at the end of the last decade however, both economically and politically. Importantly, Mr. Trump’s aggressive trade policies have undone work by Mr. Biden to form a united democratic front against Beijing, pushing Canada and much of Europe closer to China.
Beijing has long sought to be seen as an equal to the U.S. in the superpower stakes, and already shocked Washington by fighting it to a draw in last year’s trade war. If it can buy time and win more friends during the rest of Mr. Trump’s term, it will be well placed for any rematch.
With reports from Alexandra Li in Beijing