BEIJING — President Donald Trump embraced a name for this week’s summit with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, riffing on the Group of Seven meeting of the world’s largest economies.
“It’s the two great countries. I call it the G-2. This is the G-2,” he said in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity that aired Friday and was taped after Thursday’s bilateral meeting with Xi. “I think it’ll go down as a very important moment in history.”
Though Trump was the one who said it, the image of two superpowers on similar footing was exactly what Xi aimed to achieve with the visit, analysts said. Over two days of meetings here, the carefully choreographed pageantry and the reciprocal gestures of friendship and respect between the world’s two most powerful men displayed a geopolitical dynamic that the Chinese have long craved and Americans had resisted.
“Xi has done something Chinese leaders have been working toward for decades — bringing an American president to Beijing as an undisputed peer,” said Julian Gewirtz, who served as China director on the National Security Council under President Joe Biden. “Xi used the opulent optics of the visit to make clear to the world that China and the United States are the two dominant, equally matched superpowers. There is no going back.”
Trump on Friday scoffed at the suggestion that the U.S. was an empire in decline — appearing to be reacting to something Xi had said, perhaps his reference on Thursday to the “Thucydides trap,” Harvard University historian Graham Allison’s term for a rising power challenging a dominant one. Trump said he sided with Xi as far as criticizing his predecessor but had already turned things around.
“Two years ago, we were, in fact, a Nation in decline. On that, I fully agree with President Xi!” Trump said on social media on Friday, before departing Beijing. “But now, 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!”
Trump came into the summit without clearly defining his strategy or goals. He indicated he would discuss his standoff with Iran over oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz but rejected needing China’s help, and he left without announcing firm commitments or developments on that and several other issues.
“We feel very similar about we want it to end,” Trump said Friday at a second meeting with Xi, referring to the war on Iran. “It’s a crazy thing there, a little bit crazy.”
He brought executives from top American companies with the promise of new trade deals and investments and brought them in to talk during Thursday’s meeting with Xi. The main deal that has been announced was an agreement for China to buy what Trump said would be 200 Boeing jets. His statement led the company’s shares to fall because it was less than investors expected.
The administration also expects the summit to produce an agreement for China to buy U.S. agricultural products worth “double-digit” billions annually for the next three years, Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told Bloomberg TV on Friday.
“We’ve made some fantastic trade deals, really for both countries,” Trump said Friday. Shortly after 2 p.m. local time, Trump was on Air Force One, ready to depart.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in an interview with CNBC, said the two countries would also move toward future talks on artificial intelligence, another topic on which the summit did not lead to any immediate agreement.
“The two AI superpowers are going to start talking” about potential joint steps on large language models, Bessent said, emphasizing a desire “to make sure non-state actors don’t get ahold of these models.”
Trump has frequently drawn on suspense and unpredictability to get results in past summits. This time he stuck to his scripted remarks at the public portions of Thursday’s formal meeting and banquet. Other than the friendly interview with Hannity, he did not take any questions from reporters while in China, and the White House offered only a 158-word summary of Thursday’s meeting.
The Chinese side, by contrast, released a longer, more detailed official account as well as multiple reports in state media, leading Xi’s warning to Trump on Taiwan to become the dominant theme in global coverage for most of the summit’s first day and a half.
Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he declined to answer Xi’s question about whether the United States would defend Taiwan. Trump said he would decide about selling weapons to Taiwan.
“I made no commitment either way,” he said. “The last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles away.”
U.S. officials said ahead of the meeting that they did not expect any change to the administration’s Taiwan policy, and there is no indication of one. But the Iran war has redeployed U.S. equipment to the Middle East and depleted munitions stockpiles, while China studies and learns from the U.S.’s military conduct, according to an intelligence assessment reported by The Washington Post.
The G-2 concept predates Trump, and was first floated in Washington during President Barack Obama’s term, as the U.S. increasingly recognized the importance of its economic relationship with China. The construct failed to gain traction, however, and Trump has revived it as he seeks to improve relations with China.
Despite Xi’s ambitions to project China as a rising superpower, Beijing officially refrains from endorsing terms like “G-2,” preferring to speak of “stability” and to portray a multipolar world with the U.S. as one pole rather than a globe divided into spheres of influence between China and the United States.
Overtly embracing a G-2 could be awkward for the Chinese now, as Xi is scheduled to host his ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin, later this month.
Still, state-affiliated scholars have pointed to a tacit recognition that China and the U.S. are a “de facto G-2,” with China now viewing itself as a peer to the U.S. in managing global affairs.
Zheng Yongnian, a Shenzhen-based political scientist who has been advising the Chinese government on reform and development, said in a speech in February that “China and the United States are not only the two most significant powers in international politics and the core pillars propping up the international order, but also the crucial builders of the international order of the future.”
During his public remarks, Xi more directly posed China as a rising challenger to U.S. dominance, describing international affairs as undergoing a “transformation not seen in a century” that is “accelerating across the globe” — a veiled reference to a decline in U.S. influence and a rise in Chinese power, according to state media and state-affiliated scholars.
China has long emphasized noninterference as a core tenet of its foreign policy, and its leaders prefer to focus on its economy and seeking stability in relations with the U.S., experts say.
“They’re pretty uncomfortable with the notion of G-2 bringing them responsibilities that they don’t really want to take on,” said a former U.S. official involved in Asia, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic issues.
Trump said Friday that he had raised at least one human rights issue in his closed-door meetings with Xi, that of wrongful detentions.
The imprisonment of Hong Kong businessman and pro-democracy supporter Jimmy Lai has been a bipartisan focus of Congress and U.S. human rights activists. Lai is “a tough one” for Xi, Trump said, but he said the Chinese leader promised to consider the case of a detained pastor, Ezra Jin.
U.S. China hawks had questioned whether Trump would ignore Lai’s case to sweeten relations with Xi.
The framing of the U.S. and China as equals has grabbed attention among U.S. allies and partners in Asia who are navigating delicate relationships with both nations. Japan, a U.S. ally in a diplomatic tiff with China over Taiwan, is watching the summit closely to see how to manage its relationship with both countries.
Japanese commentators wrote on Thursday that Tokyo needs to navigate its foreign affairs cautiously, or risk being isolated in the region and in its relationship with the United States.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi spoke by phone with Trump after he left Beijing, she said in a post on social media.
Trump called from Air Force One and “provided a detailed explanation of his recent visit to China, and we exchanged views, centering on various issues surrounding China, including the economy — encompassing economic security — and security matters,” she wrote.
On Friday, Xi told Trump that he had decided to host him for tea in Zhongnanhai, the former imperial garden that is the cloistered headquarters and residence compound of Chinese leaders, to repay the U.S. leader for hosting him at Mar-a-Lago in 2017. Trump was heard saying on his way into the tearoom that Xi was giving him roses for the White House Rose Garden. He announced plans for Xi to visit on Sept. 24.
“So we’re going to lay it on the line,” he said Friday, “and you’re going to walk away, hopefully very impressed, like I’m very impressed with China.”
Lee reported from Taipei, Taiwan. Lyric Li in Taipei and Chie Tanaka in Tokyo contributed to this report.
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