Bully in a china shop
THE present and the future — President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping — sat face to face across the conference table in Beijing.
Trump’s state visit on May 13-15 was their seventh face-to-face encounter. Although Trump has visited China only twice (in November 2017, and now in May 2026), Xi Jinping has been to the US multiple times since 1985. Most famously in 2017, he travelled to Trump’s vacation home at Mar-a-Lago, Florida. Xi knows the US like the back of Trump’s hand.
Rather like the movements in Japanese Kabuki dance dramas, every Chinese gesture has significance. When Trump was received on arrival by the senior but insignificant Chinese Vice President Han Zheng, the slight was undoubtedly intentional.
President Trump took with him a posse of 17 top CEOs, including Elon Musk of Tesla/SpaceX, Tim Cook of Apple, and the heads of BlackRock, Blackstone, Boeing, Citigroup, GE Aerospace, and Mastercard — collectively worth over $1 trillion. President Xi shook hands with Trump’s party. All were responsive, except for the unsmiling, unbending Pete Hegseth, who wanted to assert that he was the US secretary of war. (Shades of Britain’s first envoy Earl Macartney who, in 1793, refused to kowtow to Emperor Qianlong.) Hegseth forgot that, while he may be Trump’s current Rottweiler, Xi Jinping is China’s president for life.
What MAGA is to Trump, MCOA is to Xi.
Last in the line stood Trump’s second son Eric and his wife Lara, also in search of profitable pickings. Noticeably absent was Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Was Kushner’s exclusion from the Beijing jaunt deliberate? Is Kushner being punished for the US-Arab discords or the sterility of the US-Iran talks? Bob Davis and Lingling Wei, in their book Superpower Showdown (2020) — a study of the Cold War battle between Trump and Xi — have revealed Jared Kushner’s key role in both Trump administrations.
In 2016, then president-elect Trump told Fox News: “I don’t know why we have to be bound by a One China policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade.” Kushner together with the then Chinese ambassador Cui Tiankai worked secretly to repair the damage. They prepared a “highly scripted” telephonic exchange between presidents Trump and Xi. It took place after Trump’s inauguration on Feb 9, 2017. Xi told Trump: “I would like you to uphold the One China policy.” Trump replied: “At your request, I will do that.”
Trump’s concession reiterated the Shanghai Joint Statement of 1972, negotiated between Nixon and Zhou Enlai, in which the PRC reaffirmed its position: “The Government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government of China; Taiwan is a province of China which [will be] returned to the motherland.” The US acknowledged “that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China”.
So President Xi, remembering the joint statement of 1972 and his telephonic conversation with Trump of 2017, in his opening speech told Trump bluntly that “the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-US relations. If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy”. In effect, what Make America Great Again (MAGA) is to Trump, Make China One Again (MCOA) is to Xi, and he is prepared to fight to achieve China’s reunification.
President Trump’s rambling response revealed that he follows his own instincts rather than the advice of experienced specialists. As he wrote in his popular memoir Trump:The Art of the Deal (1987): “I play it very loose. I don’t carry a briefcase [.] I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops [.] I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present.” As Talleyrand said of the French Bourbons, Trump has “learned nothing, and forgotten nothing”.
The Beijing summit ended without resolve. Trump’s billionaires returned to the US with empty briefcases. (Incidentally, after Trump’s first visit to Beijing in 2017, the US commerce department touted 37 deals worth $250 billion.)
During the Sino-US trade negotiations (2018-2020), the US chief representative Robert Lighthizer apparently confessed to his counterpart Liu He: “I have spent many hours studying Chinese history and society. I know enough about China to realise that I don’t have any idea of how you think about things.” Liu replied: “That’s the beginning of wisdom.”
At the conference table in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People last week, on one side sat two and a half centuries of accumulated wealth; on the other, millennia of inherited wisdom.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, May 21st, 2026