In perhaps the most telling moment of their two-day summit, Chinese leader Xi Jinping looked U.S. President Donald Trump in the eye and told him, not so subtly, that China is eclipsing the United States as the world’s leading power.
“The world has reached a crossroads,” Mr. Xi said, addressing Mr. Trump across a long table and a centerpiece of pink and white flowers, as senior Chinese and American officials looked on.
“Can the U.S. and China overcome the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and create a new paradigm for great power relations?” Mr. Xi asked, with a faint smile. He was referring to the 5th-century Greek historian Thucydides, who described how the rise of city-state Athens alarmed the established power, Sparta, making the Peloponnesian War inevitable.
Why We Wrote This
Beyond the flattery and pomp, the Trump-Xi summit underscores the narrative that China has risen to peer status with the United States, with Xi Jinping ever more confident that his long-game strategy is paying off, while U.S. leverage is shrinking.
In less than three minutes of carefully crafted opening remarks to Mr. Trump at their first meeting on Thursday in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Mr. Xi presented the American president with a confident statement of China’s inevitable ascent, challenged him to handle it without conflict, and laid out Beijing’s new framework for how to do just that.
Mr. Xi’s message to Mr. Trump was clear: “You’re the declining power, we are the rising power. … So the question for you is whether you’re going to accept our rise and not resist,” says Nadège Rolland, distinguished fellow in China Studies at the National Bureau of Asian Research, a U.S. think tank. “All of that is said with a … red-carpet treatment, but these are very brutal assessments of the situation, and they are veiled threats as well.”
How did we get here?
For decades under Mr. Xi and previous Communist Party leaders, China has pursued a long-game strategy to expand its economic power, stockpile strategic resources, gain dominance over manufacturing supply chains, construct roads and railways around critical choke points, and build up its military and diplomatic reach.
The goal of this strategy is what Mr. Xi calls China’s “great rejuvenation” – whereby it regains its past glory after a “century of humiliation” by Western colonial powers and Japan, starting with the opium wars during the Qing Dynasty and ending with the culmination of Mao Zedong’s communist revolution in 1949.
Fixated on national security, Mr. Xi seeks to make China a fortress economy and global leader that won’t again fall vulnerable to exploitation by foreign countries.
Beijing was initially caught off guard by Mr. Trump’s first administration, in which he oversaw a major pivot away from the U.S. policy of engagement with China toward strategic competition in areas such as trade and technology.
But China’s leaders learned from both the 2018-20 trade war and sanctions imposed on Russia after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Over the past several years, Beijing has refined its own tool kit to counter U.S. trade sanctions, including leveraging its dominance over rare earth minerals.
Mr. Xi played those cards decisively – matching Mr. Trump blow for blow after he slapped prohibitively high tariffs on China last year – ultimately forcing the U.S. president to reach a truce during their meeting in South Korea in October.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s unpopular policies – from global tariffs to clashes with traditional allies to the Iran war – have created an opening for Beijing to claim it is the more responsible, predictable superpower. A string of U.S. allies have since flocked to Beijing to meet with Mr. Xi.
All these events set the stage for this week’s summit, which saw Mr. Xi seize the initiative.
Maxim Shemetov/Reuters
Differing approaches
Beaming at a crowd of cheering, flag-waving children, and admiring the white-gloved Chinese military honor guard, Mr. Trump then sat down across from Mr. Xi on Thursday and gushed about the lavish welcoming ceremony.
Later, however, he appeared to take note of Mr. Xi’s reference to U.S. decline.
“When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, “he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of … the Biden Administration.”
“But now,” he continued, “the United States is the hottest Nation anywhere in the world, and hopefully our relationship with China will be stronger and better than ever before!”
Overall, Mr. Trump’s personal and transactional approach to the summit differed markedly from the more strategic posture of Mr. Xi. In public comments, Mr. Trump emphasized his personal relationship with Mr. Xi, while also lobbying for greater U.S. business opportunities with China.
Both treated one another with respect, but Mr. Trump repeatedly called the Chinese leader a “friend” – sentiments that Mr. Xi did not publicly reciprocate.
“He’s all business … no games,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Xi during an interview on Fox News on Thursday night.
Mr. Trump’s wish list for the visit included deals for Chinese purchases of U.S. aircraft, agricultural goods, and other products. After the meetings, he said Beijing had agreed to buy billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. farm goods as well as 200 Boeing aircraft.
On global issues, Mr. Trump sought China’s help in ending the Iran war, saying Mr. Xi, too, wants to see the conflict ended and the Strait of Hormuz opened. The two sides discussed placing guardrails on artificial intelligence. And Mr. Trump said the U.S. side brought up China’s nuclear program and discussed “de-nuclearization.”
The U.S. president again referred to China and America as the “G-2” during his Fox News interview, suggesting that he endorsed a peer relationship between the countries.
For his part, Mr. Xi put forward the new paradigm of “a constructive, strategic and stable relationship” between China and the U.S., saying they should limit their competition and manage their differences to prevent conflict. Beijing could use this framework to constrain Washington, experts say. For example, “China could say that, if you sell more offensive weapons to Taiwan, that’s going to disrupt the strategic stability between our two countries,” says Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center.
At the summit, Mr. Xi warned Washington to show caution in supporting Taiwan, the self-governing democratic island that China claims as its territory. Asked by reporters on Friday about a pending U.S. arms package for Taiwan worth an estimated $14 billion, Mr. Trump said he had yet to make a decision. He also said he declined to tell Mr. Xi whether or not the U.S. would defend Taiwan militarily.
“President Xi and I talked a lot about Taiwan,” Mr. Trump said. “He does not want a fight for independence.”
“I heard him out,” he said, adding, “I didn’t make a comment on it.” That news is likely to be welcomed by Taiwan and other Asian allies, who were watching the visit carefully for any shift in U.S. policy on Taiwan.
Beijing plans to press on with its efforts to influence U.S. policy ahead of three more anticipated summits this year – a reciprocal state visit by Mr. Xi to the U.S. in September, talks at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in China in November, and a Group of 20 gathering in Florida in December.
“I am willing to work with President Trump to steer the ship of China-U.S. relations well, making 2026 a historic and landmark year,” Mr. Xi said.