When China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, and President Trump meet in Washington this week, the two men will be operating on vastly different clocks.
The American president is constrained by the immediate demands of a midterm election in November and a grinding war. The Chinese leader is gearing up for a norm-shattering fourth term as head of the ruling Communist Party, that will keep him in power for another five years.
For Mr. Xi, the disparity in political realities gives him an edge in maintaining the truce that the two countries reached last year. A renewed trade fight would hit American consumers right before the election — a risk Mr. Trump can ill afford. China’s economy is struggling too, but Mr. Xi answers to no electorate, giving him the patience to prolong the détente on his terms.
“Each of Xi’s face-to-face encounters with Trump in his second term would only have reinforced Xi’s prior conviction that Trump is leading an America that is dangerous but declining,” said Jonathan Czin, a researcher at the Brookings Institution who previously worked at the C.I.A. analyzing Chinese politics.
Mr. Xi, who will sit down for talks with Mr. Trump on Thursday, may be wagering that leaning into Mr. Trump’s preference for leader-to-leader diplomacy can insulate the relationship from flash points like the status of Taiwan, the self-governed island claimed by Beijing, and the competition to dominate artificial intelligence.
Keeping Mr. Trump at bay would give Mr. Xi breathing room to work on rejuvenating his listless economy, which has been weakened by a property crisis, high youth unemployment and excess production. It would give him time to rebuild the upper echelons of his military leadership, which he has hollowed out in a drive against corruption and disloyalty. And it would allow him to continue expanding his country’s industrial, technological and military strength for a future showdown with the United States.
Analysts say China benefits every time Mr. Trump’s attention drifts elsewhere. By quarreling with traditional American allies or sinking deeper into the war in Iran, Mr. Trump is weakening his country’s global standing and pulling troops away from the Pacific.
“Xi would love to tell Trump, ‘Go on, stay the course,’” said Suisheng Zhao, executive director of the China Center at the University of Denver. “For Xi, Trump represents a window of opportunity for China, so his priority is to buy more time.”
An Emboldened Xi Heads to Washington
Since first meeting Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago more than nine years ago — a gathering best remembered for being when Mr. Xi learned about U.S. missile strikes on Syria while dining on what Mr. Trump described as the “most beautiful chocolate cake” — Mr. Xi has had an extraordinary amount of time for a Chinese leader to size up his chief geopolitical rival.
Early in Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Xi was somewhat accommodating toward the American president. In 2018, his government agreed to purchase $200 billion in additional U.S. goods and services to offset a trade imbalance (though Beijing never fully honored that deal).
Last year, Mr. Xi flipped the dynamic between the two superpowers.
Faced with Mr. Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, Mr. Xi was the only world leader who refused to back down, choosing instead to match his opponent with one sky-high tariff after another. Mr. Xi then reached for his ace card by throttling exports of Chinese critical minerals, or rare earths, which companies globally need for modern technologies. Backed into a corner, the Trump administration called for a truce.
It was a payoff years in the making: a rare instance in which Beijing not only withstood U.S. pressure but turned the tables and forced it to relent. Beijing, as a result, is emboldened today and sees itself more as an equal to Washington, analysts say.
The Trump administration “thought they could use massive unilateral pressure to force China to make concessions. And that did not occur. In fact, the opposite did,” said Scott Kennedy, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“I think now this is Xi Jinping’s world and we’re all living in it,” he added.
An Unstable Truce
The superpowers should put limits on competition, Mr. Xi’s argument goes, to avoid what he has warned could be a catastrophic clash. To this end, he has pushed a formula he calls “constructive strategic stability.”
In practice, what this means is that Beijing wants Washington to accept boundaries on where it can challenge China.
In July, for example, when the U.S. Federal Communications Commission proposed a ban on Chinese-made humanoid robots, China’s Ministry of Commerce invoked the phrase, demanding that Washington roll back the restrictions to preserve “strategic stability.”
American analysts view the slogan not as a serious effort at ironing out differences but as an attempt to get Washington to recognize China’s clout and back off. China could apply it to any new U.S. restrictions on chip exports or arms sales to Taiwan.
“The truce is not constructive because little diplomatic infrastructure is being built,” Mr. Czin of the Brookings Institution said. “It is tactical rather than strategic. And therefore it is inherently unstable.”
Summitry is the Strategy
Mr. Xi appears to have calculated that the best way to manage the United States is to engage Mr. Trump in high-profile summits rich in optics but thin in substance.
The planned meeting on Thursday will be their third face-to-face in less than a year, a pace that could continue with talks in November at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China, and at the Group of 20 summit in Miami in December.
“Head-of-state diplomacy is the cornerstone of China-U.S. relations,” China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, told Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a call on Thursday.
But beyond extending the trade truce, the meetings have produced few breakthroughs. China may agree to more agricultural purchases this week, but expectations are low on issues like A.I. safety or China’s trade imbalances.
That is by design, analysts say. Enticing Mr. Trump with the pageantry of summits he seems to relish lowers the risk that he may do something to derail relations — like greenlight a package of arms to Taiwan.
Tellingly, Mr. Trump has avoided criticizing China in the lead-up to the talks, even downplaying a Wall Street Journal report that China had supplied Iran with satellite images of a U.S. base in Jordan where three American troops were killed in an Iranian strike.
The summitry will also serve a domestic purpose for Mr. Xi by burnishing his image at home as a global statesman, during a moment of economic anxiety for many Chinese. It is important for Mr. Xi to demonstrate that he can manage Beijing’s most critical bilateral relationship, analysts say.
Mr. Trump is expected to greet Mr. Xi personally on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland when his plane lands on Wednesday. The White House will host Mr. Xi and Peng Liyuan, the first lady, for a state dinner, the first such banquet since King Charles III and Queen Camilla visited in April.
“Xi wants to be seen by the Chinese public as a highly respected, influential and consequential world leader — and nothing can top being wined and dined at the White House,” said Minxin Pei, a professor at Claremont McKenna College who studies Chinese leadership politics.
“Xi cannot afford to be distracted by a huge confrontation with the United States,” Mr. Pei said.
Berry Wang contributed research.
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