The United States and China are finally going to talk. This weekend, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will meet Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Switzerland to begin negotiations over the trade war that has strangled commerce between the two powers, ever since Donald Trump assumed the presidency and imposed additional tariffs of 145 percent on Chinese imports.
Trump’s negotiating position will be the weaker one. Already in recent months, U.S. policy has appeared to vacillate, its strategy and goals uncertain, while Chinese leader Xi Jinping has held fast, presented an image of strength, and kept his larger geopolitical goals in focus. China has taken the opportunity of the chaos of Trump’s trade policy to draw other countries, including American allies, closer to itself.
None of this was the White House’s plan. When he imposed the tariffs, Trump seems to have expected that Xi would rush to negotiate their removal. Instead, the Chinese leader matched Trump tariff for tariff and hit back at the United States—for instance, with export restrictions on rare-earth metals that the American tech industry relies on. And Xi began making his own demands. China’s Commerce Ministry said in a statement last month that Washington should remove all “unilateral” tariffs on China.
The longer this standoff has persisted, the more Trump has signaled that he’s the one who badly needs a trade deal. “I think he’s going to want to get to a deal,” Trump said of Xi on April 9. The next day, he told a Cabinet meeting that he’d love a trade deal with China. “Oh, we’re going to make a deal,” Trump said again a few days later. There is a “very good chance” he can reach a deal with China, he said last week. In late April, Trump repeatedly asserted that the two sides were in talks, but his policy team sent mixed messages, and in some cases, failed to back him up.
The confusion has characterized much of Trump’s trade strategy. His senior policy makers have variously said that the purpose of the tariffs was to bring factories back to the U.S., raise revenue for the federal government, and bargain for trade deals with targeted countries—goals that clearly conflict. Trump declared April 2, when he announced his worldwide tariff plan, a “Liberation Day” that would free the country from unjust foreign trade practices. A week later, he suspended most of those tariffs and started negotiating them away in trade pacts.
Just days ahead of talks with China, Trump’s goals remain unclear. Bessent, in an interview after the meeting was announced, said that the immediate purpose was “de-escalation”—implying the postponement, reduction, or removal of the tariffs Trump has just imposed. He went on to say that forcing manufacturing back to the U.S., beyond a few strategic sectors, was not the administration’s intent after all. “In terms of mass production, then they can have at it,” he said of China.
Beijing’s far more consistent position has been that China will not bow to American pressure, and that Washington must act to resolve the crisis it started. China has also signaled its willingness to walk away from the talks before they begin: China’s Commerce Ministry on Wednesday stated that if Washington “tries to use talks as a pretext to continue coercion and extortion, China will absolutely refuse and will not sacrifice its principles.”
Xi’s resolve is rooted in a well-defined economic program of state-led technological and industrial development—priorities he has pursued for more than a decade and is unlikely to alter for Trump. Politicians and business leaders around the world have criticized Xi’s use of state subsidies to promote Chinese industry, but to no avail. Instead, Xi will probably seek some small agreements—such as a deal related to TikTok, in which Trump has already expressed an interest—while protecting his core economic policies. He may even press Trump for concessions, such as the removal of U.S. export controls on chip technology.
In the meantime, Trump continues to overestimate his leverage. “I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, ‘If you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay,’” Trump said about negotiating with China. “They can go someplace else, but there aren’t too many places they can go.”
In fact, there are. Xi has been working to reduce his country’s reliance on the American market for more than a decade. As a result, America’s importance to Chinese trade has been consistently declining. In 2018, China shipped more than 19 percent of its exports to the United States; last year, that number was less than 15 percent. At the same time, China’s total trade with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations has surged by nearly 60 percent since 2019, to almost $1 trillion last year. And Xi has been fostering new bonds of trade, investment, and finance with emerging economies through his global infrastructure program, the Belt and Road Initiative, which he launched in 2013.
Trump is the one who has come under heavy economic pressure amid the trade stalemate. Executives from Walmart and other major retailers warned the president in mid-April of rising prices and product shortages if his tariffs stayed in place. With the U.S. economy contracting in the first quarter, recession fears rising, and the stock market sinking, the administration has already been forced to backtrack: Last month, it exempted mobile phones, computers, and other electronics from most tariffs, and then reduced the impact on automakers by excluding them from some tariffs.
To be sure, the trade war has created some economic problems for Xi as well. Data released last week indicated a sharp drop in export orders for Chinese manufacturers. But while Trump is buffeted by the movements of stock and bond markets, the concerns of big-business backers, dissenting voices within his own White House, and public opinion, Xi governs unchallenged and is largely insulated from such hour-to-hour pressures.
The Chinese leader has even managed to turn the trade war to his political advantage. Xi’s government has portrayed itself as a resolute defender of the Chinese nation and mocked its opponent. CCTV, a state television network, dubbed Trump the “10,000-Tariff Grandpa,” and an affiliated social-media account asserted last week that “the U.S. is clearly the more anxious party at this stage.” The hashtag #TrumpChickeningOut has been trending on Chinese social media, and online commentators have nicknamed the U.S. president “Comrade Nation Builder”—as in, the man building up China.
Xi has given every indication that his ambitions extend well beyond doing business with the United States—to rolling back American global power and asserting leadership of the developing world. While Bessent awaits the meeting with his Chinese counterpart over tariffs, Xi is in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin. And throughout the standoff with the United States, the Chinese leader has sought to rally other countries, including Vietnam but also the European Union, to Beijing’s side against “unilateral and bullying actions,” as he put it to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez in April.
The appeal of this campaign undoubtedly has limits, as many countries have serious concerns about Chinese trade practices. But Trump’s tariffs have given Xi an opportunity to portray himself as the more responsible and reliable statesman. The U.S. president, meanwhile, has evinced no consistent vision or commitment comparable to Xi’s. And he is coming into talks at a disadvantage as a result.
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