President Trump has postponed his visit to China by several weeks, blaming the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. The trip, which could help stabilize the U.S. relationship with Beijing and revive wider exchanges, should not be allowed to slide indefinitely.
Washington needs to restore regular travel by American policymakers to China, which dropped sharply in recent years, just as the economic and geopolitical competition between the two countries has intensified.
No American president has set foot in China since Mr. Trump did in 2017, during his first term. That absence highlights a simple but troubling truth: Americans talk incessantly about the need to compete with their country’s greatest rival and how to do it. Yet many U.S. policymakers have never been to China.
U.S. officials are left grappling with an abstraction. This can lead to serious misjudgments, such as the escalating tariffs Mr. Trump imposed last year, expecting they would bring China to its knees. In the end, he retreated after Beijing showed it had the tools and capacity to push back.
Seeing China up close — its manufacturing juggernaut, technological and innovative capacities, state-of-the-art infrastructure and state-fostered industrial ecosystems — would help prevent such miscalculations and hopefully lead to U.S. policy that is less complacent, less theatrical and more focused on what’s actually needed to revitalize American industry.
Congressional travel to China used to be routine. According to data compiled by the scholar Scott Kennedy, 177 U.S. lawmakers took part in 59 congressional delegations to China from 2010 to 2019. Such exchanges have essentially stopped since 2020. Likewise, American presidents since Ronald Reagan had gone to China at least once during their terms, but that ended with Joe Biden, who never visited as president.
This matters more than you might think. Richard Nixon’s visit in 1972 ended decades of estrangement, and subsequent congressional delegations contributed to the normalization of U.S.-China relations in 1979. Cold War-era visits to the Soviet Union — by presidents and members of Congress — were crucial in helping the United States gather information, manage tensions and sustain dialogue on crucial issues such as arms control.
Official travel to China was cut off by the pandemic and has yet to recover, because of factors such as tighter government control over Chinese society, Beijing’s experiment with a more combative so-called wolf warrior diplomacy a few years ago and mounting tension between the two countries. China’s periodic imposition of exit bans on U.S. citizens and the imposition of sanctions on government officials on both sides have further chilled the atmosphere. China became toxic in Washington; visiting there risked inviting a political backlash. The political climate has also sharply curtailed the number of Americans going to China for tourism, study and scholarly exchange.
This situation does not serve American interests. Seeing China as it is will help the United States judge where to compete with China, where to cooperate and how to strengthen its own foundations.
To restore American competitiveness, Congress in 2022 passed the CHIPS and Science Act to boost U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and the Inflation Reduction Act, with its support for renewables, electric vehicles and battery supply chains. But much more needs to be done to build U.S. engineering talent, its power infrastructure and industrial base to compete long term with China’s scale and dynamism.
That becomes clear when you see firsthand the modernity of China’s factories, the expertise of its scientists and technologists and the integrated production ecosystems behind its world-beating battery, electric vehicle and biotechnology sectors and other industries of the future.
We regularly travel to China and often brief policymakers in Washington about what we’ve seen. They lean in most when we describe our recent conversations with leaders and experts in China about how its system works and the internal debates and competing interests behind the state media headlines. American officials should be having these experiences themselves.
After traveling to Shanghai in September, Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said he hadn’t realized how “advanced” the city was, and concluded, “We need far more trips to China.” Many others have returned from China recently with similar impressions.
Firsthand engagement can make clear to Beijing that certain American concerns are shared across party lines. When Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, traveled there as part of a rare delegation in 2023, his bipartisan group pressed President Xi Jinping on controlling fentanyl precursor chemicals, adding to a broader diplomatic effort that led to a commitment from Beijing to do more.
Former Representative Mike Gallagher once dismissed diplomacy with China as “zombie engagement” — empty talk with no meaningful outcomes. But at the very least, dialogue can yield useful clues about Chinese thinking and build personal relationships that may prove useful in a crisis.
One step Mr. Trump should take is to direct Secretary of State Marco Rubio to restore the China travel programs that were previously authorized under the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act, which provides a legal framework for federal employees to participate in exchanges funded by foreign governments.
As secretary of state, Mike Pompeo saw those programs as “propaganda tools” for Beijing and shut them down in 2020. We should, of course, always remain cleareyed about Chinese motives. But to suggest that the routine hospitality of a foreign government will turn American policymakers into apologists is an insult.
The answer is not to end these visits but to make them more transparent and reduce the risks of espionage and undue influence. This can be done by requiring prompt disclosure of trips’ funding, purposes and itineraries; banning the participation of lobbyists; and making predeparture security briefings a standard part of the process.
Restoring regular travel to China will be neither simple nor risk-free. But the greater strategic danger lies in American policies that are based on stale assumptions, secondhand impressions and an incomplete understanding of what China is building.
Jing Qian is a vice president of the Asia Society and a founder and managing director of the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. Neil Thomas is a fellow on Chinese politics at the center and a national security fellow at the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations.
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