Trump is relying on Xi for global stability. But at what cost?

With the usual caveats regarding timing, yesterday the Foreign Ministry in Beijing also confirmed the long-awaited state visit by leader Xi Jinping to the United States, which is due to begin tomorrow and will be the first in more than ten years. Spokesperson Guo Jiakun struck a particularly optimistic tone, stating that two visits between heads of state “within six months” (Trump was in Beijing in mid-May) represent “a milestone”. No one, in either Washington or Beijing, is expecting any major announcements from the visit, but there are already signs of how diplomacy between the United States and China is changing under the Trump administration. Wu Xinbo, an influential political scientist at Fudan University in Shanghai whose views are heeded at Zhongnanhai, told Reuters yesterday that relations between the world’s two largest economies now appear to be based on ‘give and take’. 

The language of negotiation is Donald Trump’s favourite, but it is also the area where the Chinese leadership has the most room for manoeuvre. In the early months of Trump’s second term, China demonstrated its ability to withstand the onslaught of tariffs and to implement effective countermeasures: to date, according to various analysts, Xi Jinping’s objective is to maintain the status quo, extending the trade truce whilst simultaneously strengthening the Chinese economy, which continues to export vast quantities (in 2026, China’s global trade surplus could remain at over one trillion dollars, as it was last year). Stability, however, comes at a price, and Washington has been trying for days to establish the boundaries of the competition. It is in this light that many analysts have interpreted the US President’s announcement of an agreement with Denmark and Greenland which, according to Trump’s statement, will guarantee the United States ‘permanent’ control over the island’s security. The South China Morning Post has summarised the views of Chinese analysts, who believe that the timing of the announcement is specifically designed to strengthen the US negotiating position at the summit with Xi, following a logic similar to that of the Panama Canal – namely, to secure control of strategic corridors in the Western Hemisphere. It is no coincidence that Beijing, while stepping up cooperation with Moscow in the Arctic, is proceeding cautiously to gauge just how far it can go. Beijing’s priority is to secure a quid pro quo: namely, freedom of manoeuvre in the South China Sea (on which Trump has never commented: on Friday, a Chinese Coast Guard vessel deliberately rammed a Philippine boat), and above all the isolation of Taiwan, the self-governing democratic island that the Chinese Communist Party would like to annex to the People’s Republic. The US president, breaking with a long-established tradition of strategic ambiguity, explicitly stated last spring that Taiwan – and the sale of US arms to the island – could be a “bargaining chip” with Beijing.

But if Trump’s real, most pressing concern at the moment is oil, one can also understand the difficulty in asking China for help with what Chinese statements refer to as ‘world peace and development’. On Ukraine, Xi continues to keep the line of communication open with Putin without any intention of mediating. On North Korea, however, in recent days the Chinese leadership has explicitly offered to act as an intermediary to facilitate a fourth meeting between Trump and Kim – another ‘favour’ to the American president, who would like to secure at least one foreign policy success, though it is not entirely clear what that might be. In the Middle East, Beijing’s role is even more ambiguous: Foreign Minister Wang Yi met his Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi in Beijing, delivering a message from Saudi Arabia calling for de-escalation, but shortly afterwards the Houthis attacked the capital, Riyadh. Yet, whilst Trump and Xi seek to stabilise bilateral relations, Beijing can present itself as the country capable of keeping channels open with Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang. For Washington, it is a matter of negotiating a way to offload at least part of the burden of crisis management; for Beijing, it is an opportunity to turn its network of relations into diplomatic leverage.

But this same rhetoric of stability is also evident in other, more strategic sectors, such as the space sector and new technologies. Just over two weeks ago, a senior official from the US Space Force revealed that the United States had deployed weapons in orbit, and Beijing reacted the following day by calling on the United States to halt its military expansion and preparations for war in space. And then there is artificial intelligence: during talks in New York between Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng last Sunday, the White House proposed establishing a mutual notification mechanism for incidents related to artificial intelligence that could reach a national security threshold – on Friday, CNN revealed that a US intelligence report produced with the help of AI had almost prompted the US military to intercept a Chinese vessel, based on information that later proved to be false. Bessent described the new “US-China AI dialogue” as an emergency communication channel between the two leading AI powers, with the aim of moving from an “opaque” relationship towards greater transparency on shared risks. The risk of Trump’s gamble lies precisely in trusting Beijing as a guardian of stability, when China has repeatedly shown that it regards agreements as tools – rather than obligations to be honoured – as long as they coincide with its own interests.