Xi Jinping sounded full of optimism as he bade farewell to Donald Trump in Zhongnanhai, the compound close to Beijing’s Forbidden City reserved for the Communist Party leadership. He said the United States president’s two-day visit to Beijing had produced “many important outcomes” as the two leaders reached an important consensus about their relationship.
“This visit is a historic and landmark visit. Thus far, we have established a new bilateral relationship – a constructive strategic stable relationship – which constitutes a milestone event,” he said.
Trump was clearly charmed by Xi’s hospitality, asking the Chinese leader if he had invited other leaders to visit the garden in Zhongnanhai and declaring the roses there the most beautiful in the world. He also found Xi to be personally appealing.
“I think he’s a warm person actually but he’s all business. There’s no games, there’s no talking about how nice the weather is. Let’s look at the stars, let’s look at the sun, you know. No, he’s all business and I like that,” Trump told Fox News.
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“If you went to Hollywood and you looked for a leader of China to play a role in a movie, central casting, you couldn’t find a guy like him. Even his physical features, you know, he’s tall, very tall, and especially for this country, because they tend to be a little bit shorter.”
Why Donald Trump is in China
Donald Trump arrived in Beijing on Wednesday night for a two-day visit that both the United States and China hope will stabilise their relationship and prolong a truce in the trade war that began over tariffs last year. The state visit – with all the pomp and ceremony that entails – had been scheduled for April but was deferred because of the war in Iran. There is a lot on the table and, in the shorthand favoured by analysts, they are: the three Ts (Taiwan and Tehran and trade) and the three Bs (beans, Boeing and beef). On day one, Trump flattered Xi Jinping but was that reciprocated? And what about the two superpower’s key interests outside trade and tariffs: Trump wants China to help open the Strait of Hormuz; Xi considers Taiwan as the most important issue in the relationship between China and the United States? Is the fact that the meeting happened at all the real win for the two countries following a period of fraught relations.Irish Times China correspondent Denis Staunton is in Beijing.Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by John Casey.
Despite Trump’s retinue of business leaders including Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, there were few deals announced during the end of the visit. And the 200 new Boeing aircraft China agreed to buy fell well short of the 500 touted by the American side in advance of Trump’s visit.
[ Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Pete Hegseth: who has travelled with Trump to China?Opens in new window ]
But a year after Trump imposed triple-digit tariffs on Chinese goods until Xi forced him to back down by choking off the supply of rare earth minerals to the US, the trade relationship has stabilised. Beijing has promised greater market access to US firms and Washington has offered to cut tariffs on some cheap Chinese goods, although neither side offered many details.
The fundamentals of the relationship remain the same after the visit as they were before and they remain engaged in a contest over technology, particularly AI. The US holds a lead in the computing power needed for advanced AI, partly because it continues to block China from accessing the most sophisticated microchips and the machines that make them.
China has adapted to these restrictions by developing AI models that work on less advanced microchips and the performance gap between Chinese and American models is narrowing. Some within the Trump administration share Huang’s view that it is better to sell advanced chips to China – if not the very best – so that they will become “addicted” to the US product rather than developing their own.
Taiwan plays an important role in the AI contest because its microchip firm TSMC dominates the global market for the semiconductors behind the infrastructure that trains and deploys AI systems. This is one reason the self-governing island is of such strategic importance to both China and the US.
Beijing views Taiwan as part of its territory that should be reunified with the mainland and Xi warned Trump that it is the single issue that could derail the relationship between China and the US. Xi wants Trump to block a huge new package of arms sales to Taiwan and to declare that the US opposes independence for the island, a shift from Washington’s current formal position of not supporting it.
“I’m not looking to have somebody go independent and we’re supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war,” Trump told Fox News before he left Beijing, adding that he wanted both Taiwan and Beijing to cool down.
“We’re not looking to have wars ... I think China is going to be okay with that. But we’re not looking to have somebody say, ‘let’s go independent because the United States is backing us’.”
What was striking about this week’s visit was the way in which Trump and Xi met as equals, both aware that they remain economically interdependent and that each has the capacity to cripple the other’s economy. Their trade truce and the three years of stability Xi spoke of will buy each side the time they need to become more resilient and less dependent on the other.
In the nine years since Trump last visited Beijing in 2017, the US and its allies have at various times sought to hold China to account over everything from the coronavirus pandemic to the crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong and the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The protests, complaints and sanctions have had no impact whatsoever and the application of the National Security Law in Hong Kong, for example, has been hardened if anything in recent years.
If the issue of human rights failed to come up during Trump’s visit, it was not only because China is now too powerful to listen to lectures from the West. It is also because the US’s foothold on the moral high ground, unsteady at the best of times, has given way altogether under Trump.
