When Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday for his first encounter with the new administration, all eyes will be on President Trump to see if his behavior toward the leader of America’s Pacific strategic rival matches his tough talk during the election.
Trump has far more riding on this meeting with his Chinese counterpart than would most U.S. presidents.
The two-day summit between Trump and Xi is likely to furnish important insight into how the president plans to advance a constructive U.S. partnership with China without soft-pedaling issues like trade, which helped drive his election to the presidency, and the country’s territorial ambitions in the South China Sea.
It was less than a year ago that the Republican nominee said the U.S. can no longer “allow China to rape our country.” Nor should Americans allow “grossly incompetent” officials to ignore the Asian superpower’s currency manipulation and intellectual property theft, he had said at the time.
“President Trump made myriad promises leading up to this sit-down and he runs the risk of disappointing his supporters if he shows up as anything but the expert negotiator he told them he’d be,” a former Trump campaign staffer told the Washington Examiner.
Realizing they may have a chance to get back in good graces with moderate voters who backed Trump if he abandons the hard-line strategy he vowed to take, Democrats have already entered attack mode.
“One of the main issues that [Trump] campaigned on was that China takes us out to lunch, stealing millions of American jobs through unfair trade practices,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Wednesday. “Yet since Donald Trump has become president, his policies have made America look like a 98-pound weakling.”
Several China specialists laid out the stakes that exist beyond the politics of China.
“We’re really at a critical inflection point. We are worried about the increasingly antagonistic relationship [and] think the U.S. needs to up its game in terms of the effort it puts into high-level negotiations,” Orville Schell, a leading scholar at the Asia Society and co-author of a 72-page report on U.S.-China relations, said in an interview last month.
Schell and others have cautioned Trump against pursuing changes to the longstanding One China policy or slapping steep tariffs on Chinese-made goods. Senior White House officials said both topics are guaranteed to come up during Trump and Xi’s conclave, as is North Korea’s belligerence and China’s rapid construction of military outposts on disputed islands in the South China Sea.
“The North Korean threat is no longer business as usual,” said Lt. Gen. Wallace Gregson, a Defense department official under the Obama administration.
White House officials have said “all options are now on the table,” But they added that Trump is likely to push for China’s cooperation on North Korea by asking Xi to increase pressure on Pyongyang to get the government to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Trump himself has said the U.S. will deal with North Korea with or without Xi’s help.
“If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you,” the president told the Financial Times in an interview published ahead of his meeting with Xi.
If Trump and Xi do reach an agreement on North Korea, disputes involving a range of other issues could prevent both leaders from developing a stable U.S.-China economic and trade relationship.
At a breakfast briefing the day before the Chinese president’s arrival, one expert in international affairs told reporters it’s nearly impossible to predict where U.S.-China relations will stand once both men emerge from their first bilateral meeting.
“I think we have to keep in mind that … Xi Jinping and Trump have one similarity that is very important: they both want to make their countries great again,” said Harry Kazianis, director of Defense studies at the Center for the National Interest. “If you look at what Xi said in the past when he took over the presidency, he came up with this great idea of the Chinese dream, righting historical wrongs, etc. That isn’t very different in what Trump’s been saying about wanting to make America great again.”
“So I think there’s two ways this could go,” he continued. “It could create a very adversarial relationship where they look at each other and say this is a zero-sum game and if I win here, China loses there. But at the same time, there are areas of opportunity where both sides can come together on certain things.”
