President Donald Trump returned to China this week, over eight years after his last visit in November 2017. The symbolism is hard to miss. Between 1972 and 2017, every US President made the journey to Beijing with the conviction that strengthening ties with China was not incongruous with preserving American dominance. Joe Biden broke with that tradition. His administration called China out as the greatest challenge to American power because it was seeking to reshape the global order built by America, and framed the rivalry as between democracy and autocracy. Trump’s return to Beijing closes that chapter. Statements from Washington, including the National Security Strategy released last November and during Trump’s visit, suggest that the US has reverted to the path of managing the rise of a rival through accommodation.
However, it might be a mistake to presume that Trump went to China with the weaker hand. Both parties came to the table with some leverage, but both are also in pain. The bruising tariff war in 2025 has damaged both economies. It is true that America’s trade deficit with China stubbornly remains at $350 billion, but China’s access to American markets is also reducing. The last time Trump was in Beijing, the near-universal expectation was that China would overtake the US in GDP terms by the mid-2020s, but the Chinese economy ($21 trillion) is still stuck at two-thirds the size of the US’s GDP ($32 trillion). Between the two visits by Trump, China’s share of global manufacturing has increased from 20 percent to 29 percent, whereas the US’s share has further declined to 16 percent. Yet, in technology, the Americans maintain the lead and still have the ability to impede China’s scientific progress due to their dominance in high-end chip design and manufacturing. And, despite persistent Chinese efforts to conduct more trade, including in oil and gas, in the renminbi, the dollar is still king.
In terms of the war in the Persian Gulf, Trump’s inability to end it on purely American terms may be satisfying, but a prolonged closure of the Hormuz Strait is not in China’s interest. Its studied non-intervention at any level suggests that it is not yet a match for US global power. It would be more accurate to say that the two leaders met on terms more equal than when Trump last called on President Xi Jinping in 2017, but not as complete equals.
Notwithstanding this, during Trump’s visit, Xi made every effort to put the relationship on par with that of two peers without equal. References to creating a ‘new paradigm of major country relations’, underscoring how this relationship was the most significant one globally, and even Xi’s reference to the ‘Thucydides Trap’—the Greek theory suggesting that a rising power threatens to displace an established dominant power—were intended to reinforce that point. China might not have explicitly mentioned a G-2, but given that Trump has used this definition earlier, its choice of phrases suggests it is not averse to the idea.
The optics suggest that neither side wishes to return to the mutually damaging tit-for-tat downward spiral of the previous year. Each party had its bucket list. China was seeking tariff relief, the softening of US sanctions against Chinese companies buying oil from Iran and easier access to semiconductors and advanced lithography to produce cutting-edge chips. The US wanted China to increase farm purchases, ease restrictions on rare-earth exports, invest more in the US and loosen regulations on American companies in China. Both sides have claimed that there were mutually beneficial outcomes. As always, the devil lies in the details.
How often in the past has China promised to make more purchases in order to balance the trade, or announced large investment commitments, and not just with the US, only to renege when the time comes to implement them? Details of the economic compromise are still to be fully unveiled, but reading between the lines, the Chinese call for ‘equal-footed consultation’ on trade and economic matters indicates that reciprocity will now be a two-way street between Washington and Beijing. Going forward, the US has diminishing capacity to ‘sanction’ the PRC without consequences.
On the broader relationship, the American media has latched onto a new definition coined by the Chinese: ‘building a constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability’. Nice sounding as that is, calling for more cooperation, competition within limits and properly managing differences, there is scarce indication whether new rules or guard rails might be put in place to prevent the relationship from falling off the cliff again. It is possibly the summit optics and framing, which the Chinese are good at. Their idea of ‘strategic stability’ likely encompasses the US’s accommodation of China’s interests in the South China Sea and the western Pacific. The US is unlikely to easily surrender control over that space.
One specific red line that was clearly articulated was Taiwan. China hoped for, but did not expect, a change in the American position (Secretary of State Marco Rubio subsequently said there was no change), but it made clear that any regression might lead to ‘clashes and even conflict’. China was signalling resolve at the highest level, and cautioning the US to be extra prudent, including on delivering the massive $11 billion arms package that Trump cleared at the end of last year.
More details will seep out over the coming weeks. India will need to pay close attention. Could the development of a de facto G-2 enhance China’s role in South Asia, as it attempted to do after the nuclear tests in 1998, when the US needed China’s help on non-proliferation? Might the US need China’s active participation in keeping the Hormuz Strait open, thereby legitimising an expanded Chinese naval presence in the northern Indian Ocean, as happened in 2007 after the West sought China’s help in anti-piracy operations off the Somali coast? Will the US dilute collaboration with India because China objects to QUAD? Will they write the global rules for AI without taking India’s requirements into consideration?
Conventional wisdom suggests that mutual suspicion is deeply entrenched between the two sides, but then, Trump is an unconventional president.
Vijay Gokhale | Former foreign secretary and former Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China
(Views are personal)