Trump’s visit to China: Xi may get the better of Trump, fear Americans

PHILADELPHIA – How much ground will he cede, either as a grandiose gesture or a concession, wangled out of him by a savvier adversary? 

As US President Donald Trump entered into the May 14-15 meetings in Beijing with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, Americans remained nervous about what their President could give up. 

Even before he had exchanged a word, prominent voices in the US foreign policy establishment and mainstream media practically declared that China would win this round of superpower arm-wrestling. Even if it was styled as a friendly match.

In fact, the match is China’s, especially because of the stylistic elements, argues Ms Henrietta Levin, a former aide in the Biden White House, in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, the repository of expert opinion on US foreign policy.

“Mr Trump’s overriding desire for visibly warm ties with Mr Xi has presented Beijing with a unique opportunity to trade optics for substance in pursuit of concessions on its foremost strategic priority, Taiwan,” said Ms Levin, now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a May 13 article.

Ms Levin served as director for China (2023-2024) and South-east Asia (2020-2023) at the White House National Security Council.

She wrote: “Mr Trump appears to believe that all problems can be resolved through his personal engagement with Xi. Accordingly, Washington could conceivably entertain strategic concessions on issues that will define US-Chinese competition for decades, such as Taiwan’s status or technology protections, in exchange for peripheral quick wins, such as Chinese purchases of soya beans or airplanes.”

As damaging as the style is the substance of Mr Trump’s strategy, Ms Levin said. The way Washington has separated its diplomacy with Beijing from efforts to compete for influence globally has enabled China to weaponise the appearance of the US-Chinese rapprochement, she said.

US allies’ concerns

Previously, US officials engaged Beijing to communicate with Chinese officials, but also as a form of alliance management, she said.

“In meetings with China, for instance, prior US administrations would raise concerns regarding Beijing’s aggression in the East China Sea. They did this to deter further coercion against Japan, but perhaps more important, Washington could tell Japan afterward that it had raised the issue. This reassured allies that Washington valued them enough to carry their priorities to Beijing. 

“At the same time, Washington used the content and pace of the US-Chinese diplomacy to reassure partners that the US would not recklessly escalate tensions with China, nor would it reconcile irresponsibly with Beijing. This message was vital for building trust with partners that feared, on the one hand, US-Chinese tensions spilling into conflict, and on the other, Washington and Beijing cutting a deal at other countries’ expense.”

Now, the US has jettisoned these global considerations, preferring to manage each of its relationships as separate affairs, Ms Levin said.

Mr Trump’s May visit would be the first since 1998 in which a US president meets only his Chinese counterpart, without stops in allied countries. 

“China, meanwhile, has skilfully wielded the appearance of rapprochement with the United States as a major tool in its own global efforts to expand Chinese influence and erode trust in the US,” Ms Levin said.

Notably absent from Mr Trump’s talking points will be a push by Washington for much-needed structural reforms in China, said Asia Society scholars Wendy Cutler and Danny Russel in a May 13 policy brief.

As always, differences between the two sides’ read-outs may prove more revealing than the official statements themselves, they added.

“Following the visit, Trump’s comments or social media posts on North Korea or Japan may also offer clues about Xi’s private messaging, particularly if Trump begins echoing Chinese narratives about Japanese ‘remilitarisation’ or the need for talks with Pyongyang on Kim Jong Un’s terms,” they said.

China’s leverage

China’s ascendancy now appears wired into Washington’s consciousness. In particular, the way China pushed back against Mr Trump’s tariffs while flexing its own muscle has caught public imagination.

China added to its heft by wielding its monopoly over rare earths – which the American economy cannot do without – as a shield against Mr Trump’s punitive tariffs. China has also become more self-sufficient in technology despite US export controls. 

Additionally, China is not unhappy to see its geopolitical rival entangled in the vastly expensive Iran war, even though it does suffer from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is the conduit for most of its energy imports from the Middle East.

Inside China, the day of the “America hawks” has dawned, note some American analysts, like Mr Sean Stein who leads the US-China Business Council.

“I think the Chinese are feeling much more self-confident now than they were a year ago. I think they’re no longer intimidated by tariffs the way they were. And I think that they’re feeling more comfortable at their place in the world,” Mr Stein told PBS News.

The possibility of China consolidating power at the expense of the US is the stuff of nightmares for Mr Oren Cass, chief economist at American Compass, a nationalistic economic think-tank he founded to advocate for the re-shoring of supply chains.

Many Americans believed that Mr Trump would do everything in his power to downsize ties between the two countries after being elected on an anti-China platform in 2024, Mr Cass noted in a May 8 opinion piece for The New York Times.

But Mr Trump’s approach to China has frequently put him at odds with his own administration, he said, noting that the new National Security Strategy, issued in December 2025, seeks merely to “rebalance America’s economic relationship with China”. 

Additionally, Mr Trump shot down the Pentagon’s plan to describe China as a top security threat in the National Defence Strategy released in January. The new US goal, the document said, would be to deter, not dominate, China.

Mr Trump has also pushed to allow China access to advanced AI chips even as his own AI Action Plan advocates against it.

Is a balanced economic relationship possible?

And now, Mr Trump might be “on the verge of tying the US to China irrevocably”, Mr Cass said in reference to reports that Mr Trump would open the gates to large Chinese investments in the US.

That would be an “unforced error of world-historic proportions”, Mr Cass said, calling China’s state-driven economic system incompatible with America’s private enterprise-driven economy.

“The grand bargain that Mr Trump wants, establishing a balanced economic relationship between the two nations, is not one that he can get, because the relationship is not one that can exist. The asymmetry of the two economic systems guarantees that any deal with China ends with the US ripped off.” 

A more conciliatory view was offered by Mr Dennis Wilder, a former senior intelligence official who currently serves as a professor of practice at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. 

“Xi and Trump appear to share a consensus that the current post-World War II rule-based order is inimical to their goals,” he noted in a May 12 analysis published at The Cipher Brief, a website focused on national security issues.

“Each may believe that it is time to negotiate a new set of rules for a world order and believe this falls to them because of their positions as co-equals in world power,” he said.

‘Chosen by fate’

“Both men are driven by urgency to protect and restore the historic ‘spirit’ of their cultures, seeming to believe that they were chosen by fate for the highest office. One’s call to action is the ‘Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation’ and the other’s slogan is ‘Make America Great Again’. Both believe in the exceptionalism and manifest destiny of their nations,” said Mr Wilder.

“Is it possible for both men to be right?”

The dominant media narrative in the US was about American weakness, which China shared, Mr Wilder noted. 

But not Mr Trump. “They may think he is weaker but he does not,” observed Mr Wilder.

“It is quite clear that those who are extremely critical of Trump’s presidency believe that Xi Jinping has the upper hand and, indeed, that he will take Trump to the cleaners. Those with less harsh – or shall we say less demonic – views of Trump and his foreign policy are inclined to believe that both leaders come in with supreme confidence in themselves and their bargaining position and strength,” he told The Straits Times.

During the trade war in 2025, both leaders showed they had the ability to damage the other’s interests, but both realised that the other side was resilient, he added.

“Both respect the other’s strongman style,” Mr Wilder said.

But that still leaves room for a “dangerous misunderstanding” between the two, noted Mr Fred Kempe, president and chief executive of the Atlantic Council.

“Both use the same word, stability, to achieve dramatically different futures,” he said in a May 13 analysis.

“For the Trump team, stability means preventing a descent into unwanted confrontation while buying time to build US leverage – industrial, military, technological and geopolitical,” Mr Kempe said, quoting a Wall Street Journal editorial that said a detente had some merit if the US spent the time diversifying its rare earths supply chain and passing a US$1.5 trillion (S$1.91 trillion) defence budget to rearm itself.

Strategists in Beijing, however, have something entirely different in mind when they seek stability.

“For Xi, achieving stability with the US doesn’t provide an end-state,” Mr Kempe noted.

“Rather, it is an opportunity to further consolidate China’s considerable gains.”