BONUS POD: Trump and Xi Meet in China

China is one of the 21st century's most consequential nations. It has never been more important to understand how the country is governed and what its leaders and its people actually want and believe. Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpecks China's evolving political system and the trajectory of China's domestic and foreign policy. I'm your host, Henrietta Levin, senior fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. This is Pekingology. Welcome to our first ever emergency pod here on Pekingology. We're recording May 15th, 2026, right around 11 a.m. Eastern time in the immediate aftermath of the summit between U.S. President Trump and Chinese President Xi. Trump is now making his way back across the Pacific, and we're going to take stock here, of what actually happened in Beijing, or at least what we know so far, and why it matters, or maybe doesn't. And for that conversation, I am very pleased to be joined today by John Zin, former director for China at the White House National Security Council and former member of the Senior Analytics Service at the CIA. John is currently Michael H. Armacost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies and fellow with the Brookings Institution. So let's dive right in. John, what did President Trump actually do in Beijing? So there were a number of engagements that he had over the last couple of days, but a lot of it was devoted to kind of the fanfare, the pomp and circumstance. The rival was very much over the top, but Xi and Xi Jinping did have a fair bit of time to sit together. I know that they had an engagement on the first day and they had a banquet, and then they had tea and zhengnanhai followed by a stroll around what used to be the imperial garden. So a fair bit of time for them to actually be in the room together and engage directly. It seems like Xi spent a lot of time discussing the history of the various trees that they observed while going on these strolls together. It's very poetic. That's one way to make use of the precious time between the two of them. The contrast was great in the opening remarks between Xi doing borderline classical poetry and then Trump having a more, you could say, practical perspective on the issues. Yes. Yes. But you know, it was really striking though, I mean, watching that, they definitely have different styles, but President Trump is known for riffing, and especially in that toast for the banquet, he did not riff. He kind of stuck. Yeah, he read the points. Yeah, he read the points. He stuck to the script, which I think is... And the script was pretty good. And it was pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, they did pretty well on that front. Like a nice tribute to the people-to-people ties, cultural ties between the countries. Yes, exactly. Not the kind of thing we often hear from Trump when he's in the US. Yes, exactly. So let's talk more about the optics. What do you make of the personal relationship to the degree there is one between Trump and Xi and perhaps any differences in how the two might perceive that relationship? Yeah. I mean, it was interesting in the run-up to this meeting and even during it, there was a lot of emphasis on the personal relationship. And you definitely got that from President Trump. But I was surprised a little bit too. You also heard that from the Chinese side. I think they had very low expectations, but I was hearing Chinese interlocutors emphasize the personal relationship between the two men. And I think it's really interesting. When you... I'll start with President Trump. We're so used to... They give him anything that he thinks of himself as being very idiosyncratic and unprecedented and very much unlike his predecessors. But I think when it comes to the personal element in international relations, he's very much like most US politicians. He kind of has the sense through his charisma and through glad-handing and back-slapping that he can make a deal and persuade even an authoritarian leader like Xi Jinping into some kind of reasonable accommodation. And I think the other thing that's really important about Trump that, of course, is an essential part of his self-conception as political persona is Trump as the consummate dealmaker. That's so core to his political identity. And it seems like a big part of what he wants to try to achieve with Xi in particular. And as somebody who's watched Xi Jinping since the George W. Bush administration and became an heir apparent, what's striking to me when you think about Xi is, he is not a dealmaker. My operating model and vision for Xi Jinping is that he's a jack-in-the-box. This is a guy who will wind up for years, sometimes for decades, and then pop when he thinks the moment is right, startling everyone around him, even though they should know that something is coming at this point. And so that's a very different modus operandi between the two leaders. The other point I would make too is that Xi Jinping is not a guy who's sentimental about his personal relationships. And I think we got a real taste of that earlier this year when he perched Zhang Youxia, the former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, with whom he had a long-standing relationship that actually extended back to their fathers, who were both in the fourth field army during China's civil war in China's Northwest back in the 1940s and got rid of him and put him under investigation. So personal relationships don't count for a lot with a guy like Xi Jinping. So it was interesting. I mean, in the lead-up to the summit, we've seen Trump speak very highly and complimentary of Xi. And in at least one of China's readouts from the meetings, they quoted Trump saying very nice, complimentary things about Xi without apparently reciprocating the compliment, at least in such a personal way. And I'm wondering, to what degree does that dynamic where Trump appears to be so actively seeking unreciprocated friendship? Does that matter for the substance of the summit, or do you see it as sort of an ancillary show? It matters in the sense that I think there's always this question that I get about, how did the Chinese feel about dealing with Trump? How does Xi feel about dealing with Trump? And I think what it reflects is they feel like they have a good handle on him. Xi has been dealing with Trump for a decade now and thinking about how to deal with him and kind of gaming this out for quite some time. So I think that kind of game of being withholding, some of that is systemic. That's just how their system is. They don't really do those kind of personal interactions necessarily, although there is a really striking contrast with how they depict the relationship with Vladimir Putin, let's say. But I think some of it is also tactical and it's a calculation, particular to Trump, that being that way, behooves them. Although there was that really striking moment when they met in Busan where you had that very unusual picture of Xi Jinping just cracking up. It must have been a great joke. Yeah. The unrequited point though, I want to dwell on that because in some ways, that was kind of true across the meeting. When you look at the readouts and we were just discussing how fragmented the readouts are from the US side, there's no one single fact sheet. But plenty of interviews and plenty to digest from the US side. But when you look at some of the readouts we've seen so far, it's almost like they were sitting in two different meetings where the Chinese side and the initial readout from the first day of the summit was very much emphasizing Taiwan, first and foremost, a variety of global issues and seemingly trying to position China as a global player. And then the readout from the US side emphasized the war with Iran and then a variety of trade and commercial issues. So it's like I keep thinking of that old Chinese aphorism that it's like a chicken talking to a duck. Right. Okay. So what do you think was actually agreed in trying to put the pieces together between these somewhat divergent readouts? What do you see as the outcomes from the summit? Yeah. Very little. And I had very low expectations going into this. It seems like the US side has been touting some concessions, but they seem pretty marginal. Right? Like maybe like a $10 billion agricultural deal and maybe the purchase of some Boeing planes. But again, none of that has been required. And it seems like even like with the Boeing purchase, for example, the number came in at $200, which seems actually quite low compared to what Boeing expected. The expectation had been $500, right? So coming in at $200 actually sent Boeing stock declining yesterday. So yeah. And after the CEO went on the trip and made such a big deal. Exactly. Well, the other issue I keep hearing about too is Boeing has such a backlog of planes. It's all kind of made up anyway. Yeah, they make this promise, right? Like if they can't deliver it until early in the 2030s, you know, how valuable is that really? And I think in the context of a big sprawling bilateral relationship, even if you just look at the economic piece, as big as these numbers are and as important as they might be for particular firms like Boeing or for particular sectors like our agricultural sector, in the scheme of this relationship, it's pretty much small ball stuff. Right? So my bumper sticker for this meeting was no escalation, no concessions. I don't think either side really gave much to the other. I think where we've landed is a perpetuation of stalemate. And that really is how I've been thinking about this, right? Stability seems like a misnomer. It's so fragile and it's so shallow, the stability that we do have. It's really more of a stalemate. I like that framing of no escalation, no concessions, which actually seems like a pretty good outcome. I mean, compared to what else might have happened. I mean, in a world where the US priorities were so kind of tactical, focused on quick economic wins, and then China seemed to have its priorities. Once we get past stability, which both sides want in some way, China seemed more focused on the big questions on Taiwan, on access to high-end technology. So you kind of wonder if there was a deal, it would almost be definitionally a little lopsided. So maybe it's actually good news. It shows that the system's working in some way, that very little concrete appears to have been announced. Yeah. I think it probably seems counterintuitive to most listeners, right? Why go through this big schlep to Beijing and make this big effort if nothing is going to really be accomplished? But I think you're right. It's actually probably not a bad outcome. And it reminds me how hard it is to get these kind of meetings, right? Especially in this moment, an era of great power competition, right? Because there's two alternative pathways, right? I try to think about this in terms of the counterfactuals. A bad meeting would be bad for everyone, right? If there was some kind of Zelensky moment, or if there was a real moment of tension between the two leaders, like, I don't think that would be an outcome that would serve either side's interests objectively. But a quote unquote, good meeting where there was a lot on the table, that could also be a little scary, right? Like if the Trump administration had made some major shift in declaratory policy on Taiwan, let's say, right? As many people were anxious about in the run-up to this meeting, right? And it had been an even more substantial meeting that could have been damaging for US interests and would have alarmed a lot of our allies and partners in the reading. So it's very tough to thread the needle on this kind of meeting and justify making the case for it. But I think you're right. I think it's probably, I keep joking, it's better than I feared and worse than I hoped. And on Taiwan, of course, there was a lot of anxiety going into this meeting about whether President Xi might be able to extract some kind of concession related to arms sales to Taiwan or declaratory policy from the US side. And this is such a complex sensitive issue that, you know, tiny wording changes can make a big strategic impact. And we didn't see any of that in public, at least. Though there were a few indicators along the way that stood out to me as a little uncomfortable. Like, when Secretary Rubio did an interview from the road and I think trying to be reassuring, because Rubio is more of a China hot kind of person, was saying that, you know, there's been absolutely no change to our Taiwan policy. We have no intention of doing that as of right now, as of this meeting. I was like, well, why did you finish your sentence that way? It was a good reminder for me of how so many of these big questions are contingent on what Trump decides to do when he walks into a particular room. And like the administration can plan as much as it wants. But ultimately, there's, I mean, it's funny, because I'm used to saying it's about the Chinese system, but like there's one person who makes decisions. But it seems so far like no decisions were made. Yeah, I think that seems right. And I think what they are trying to express, even if there's an occasional lack of precision about it, that they want to signal that there is continuity, right? And I think you saw that from President Trump, even on the flight back, right, where he was talking about, I'm not going to get into it. I'm not going to discuss whether or not we would defend Taiwan in some kind of contingency. So I think they were very much trying to make that point. And I think your point is spot on. Trump is his own China desk officer. It's very much centralized in his hand. And my sense is that there is still a lot of energy in the administration, you know, from people like Secretary Rubio, who had previously been very hawkish on China for a reversion to a more competitive policy. But, you know, it's like a pot of boiling water. He has kept a lid on that sentiment inside his administration. And I think even to some extent, you know, maybe until recently on Capitol Hill, too. And I think it's striking when you look at this set of issues, too, just the degree to which Trump really wants to be hands on on this issue, right? Like you don't even see other people from his constellation involved in this set of issues, the way you see, you know, Jared Kushner and Steve Wyckoff involved in other major foreign policy issues in the Middle East or dealing with Russia. This is really Trump's issue set. Well, while we're on the strategic agenda, what do you make of the dialogue on Iran and the war in the Middle East? Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting coming into this meeting. I think Beijing was very intentional about the choreography coming into this, right? Because they had hosted Iran's foreign minister just the week before. And during that meeting and the readout of that meeting, at least, they re-edited the rate at their long-standing talking point weeks into this war now or months into it, that they want to see the Strait of Hormuz reopen. And I think what they were trying to do by positioning that meeting ahead of time was to try to position themselves to deflect U.S. pressure on this issue. I think they were fully expecting something along those lines, and it allows them to say, yeah, we agree, the Strait of Hormuz should be reopened, right? And you saw that reflected, at least in the U.S. side, I haven't seen that reflected in Chinese statements. I think the real question is, what are they actually going to do to bring that about? And I think I got the impression from listening to Secretary Rubio's comments, and I think the president echoed this as well, where he said, look, we're not making any specific ask from the Chinese. And again, it shows how challenging it is to thread the needle on this, right? Because if you don't make an ask, then they're really not going to help you out on the set of issues. And I think Beijing is already very low to really put any pressure on the Iranians. We've seen this movie many times before with North Korea, with Russia, where they theoretically have a lot of leverage, but it's all from physics, it's latent potential. It's not actually something they're going to act on, or if they do, it's going to be very much with a scalpel than a sledgehammer. And so if they didn't really make an ask, then Beijing, I think, is going to be very reluctant to. And if they do find themselves in the position of having to make an ask, and I think this is what the administration is cognizant of, there's going to be a price tag associated with it, right? China's not going to just do it out of any kind of altruism or for the sake of international order. They're going to do it, and they'll say, okay, we can help you. Well, what are you guys going to give us in return? And so maybe we can take the apparently limited outcomes from the summit as one more data point indicating that Beijing's probably not going to be doing much to meaningfully bring the war in Iran to an end. Yeah. I mean, Wang Yi will keep working the phones, I suspect, right? But I don't think, to the extent they play a role, I think it will probably be at the margins. But if there's something near the goal line to mix metaphors, they might help nudge it across, but I don't really see them doing the heavy lifting, even when the ceasefire came into play and there was that initial reporting saying that the Chinese had helped get this over the goal line. One of my colleagues pointed out, well, yeah, but the reporting was all from the Iranian side, right? And this could just be figures within the regime. And then also US officials seeming to want it to look like they had brought China on board. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So I see why Washington and Tehran want it to look like China's more engaged. But there was never any validation of that from the Chinese side, right? And I think from the Iranian perspective, you know, what my colleague was an actual Iran expert pointed out was, you know, they were looking for an alibi. You know, it was the Chinese who pushed us, you know, we had to, we had no choice. It was interesting, even after the Iranian foreign ministers visit to Beijing, I mean, the Iranian ambassador gave some, I mean, almost desperate sounding public comments like begging China to get more involved, which maybe is yet another indicator that China is not getting more involved. I mean, not to support Iran, but certainly not to support the United States either. Like why take on risk or responsibility for a problem that they ultimately view as a US creation and something the US needs to figure out for itself. Yeah, it also gave Beijing an opportunity to, you know, reinforce its relationship with Iran by hosting the foreign minister without really actually giving it much, right? Except for the facade that they're not as internationally isolated as they in fact are. Back to outcomes from the meeting. We talked a little bit about agricultural purchases, maybe planes. What about this broader idea of managed trade? There has been supposedly a board of trade that maybe was agreed, but I think still hasn't been formally announced. What is that? Does it matter? Do you think it's going anywhere? I mean, I can't help but think that it reminds me of two things. Number one, in the context of the Trump administration, this sounds like the board of peace, right? That the Trump administration had on bail. The board of everything. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The other aspect of it is that I'm very mindful if you are going to try to stand something like this up to try to manage trade between the world's two largest economies, it is going to require an incredible amount of then strength on the staffing side, right? And a lot of technocratic expertise. And, you know, frankly, that's just not how this administration operates, especially on China, right? Like all of this seems to be handled at a very high level, as far as we can see from the outside by Secretary Besant and then the president. And so to do this in a meaningful way, I think it's going to be a tall order, even under the best of circumstances, but especially given, you know, how this administration seems to like to operate, being very top down and highly centralized, I think it'll be very challenging to do this in a meaningful way. The other thing that's really on my mind about this is it seems like it's the US side that has been pushing this idea. But I don't see, if we do set up this board of trade, I don't see how we avoid this becoming another strategic and economic dialogue or the JCCT or one of the other economic talk shops from an earlier era that the Chinese used just to bog us down, right? And that the Trump folks have criticized pretty relentlessly. Yeah. Yeah. And I've heard, you know, people from the Trump universe say this is not going to be another S&ED, this is going to be totally different. But of course, this is the game the Chinese play, right? And of course, they'll say, no, no, no, no, this is totally different. This will be a real substantive meeting. But that's going to be the literally trillion dollar question, right? Is how meaningful is this going to be? And I just want to dwell on this point for one second, Henrietta, kind of taking a step back, looking at the meeting as a whole. There were large elements of this meeting, especially when you look at the optics and the gaggle of CEOs who accompanied this, it feels like back to the future, right? Like the vibe from this meeting and the way this was so commercially focused. This felt like a meeting that could have happened, you know, in the Clinton administration or in the George W. Bush administration before we were really focused on great power competition that the first Trump administration inaugurated, right? And I think it's especially remarkable when you think about it of the arc of where we've traveled in this story just over the last 13 months, right? I mean, just a year ago, we basically had imposed a de facto embargo on China. And now you have, you know, some of our most powerful CEOs going to China, you know, apparently looking to make some kind of deal and the president promising on the way over that we're going to open up China, right? I mean, this all feels and sounds like something from an earlier era, right? If you squint your eyes and forget it's the Trump administration, it has the look and feel of something quite different from dealing with a major geopolitical rival. And if you just don't pay attention to the robots in the background of every shot in Beijing? Yeah. Well, I mean, that is the element that's really changed, right? Is that the verbiage, you know, and the optics may very much be the same from the US side from an earlier era, but China has really fortified itself, right? And especially since the first Trump administration, I mean, they basically got punched in the face and then went back to the gym and really pumped themselves up, right? And showed themselves to be much more formidable than the US side had expected when it went into liberation day. One other back to the future piece of this that I noticed was that... Was there a DeLorean that I missed? Of course. I mean, how did you miss it? Please be down, Tom. I just missed DeLorean. So Trump went to China only, which is incredibly unusual. Generally, for these trips, you would pair Beijing with stops and an allied capital, normally Japan or Korea, I mean, the right there. You basically have to refuel there anyway. Or other allies. So I went back and tried to see when the last time is that a president only met with China when he went to China. And it was 1998, I want to say, with President Clinton, who by the way, did a five-stop tour of China, including Guilin, which I did not know. I know. Well, in fairness, we were both like in middle school at the time. But still, it seems like a unique enough moment in history, like it should have come up by now. But at the time, I mean, fine, whatever. Like, who would have worried about the big strategic implications of the US president opening up China the way they would have talked about it at the time? I mean, that was like the WTO, a session, conversation, just such a different world. But now, for the China relationship to be so explicitly divorced from ties to allies, I would imagine is causing some anxiety at least elsewhere in the region. And I'm sure there's a little bit of reassurance inherent in just that not much seems to have come out of the meeting. But still, for the US to be willing to kind of put its allies aside in that way, in its engagement with Beijing, how does that look to you? It looks bad. It looks unideal. Next question. No, I'm kidding. I think you're right. I mean, I think in fairness to the Trump administration, they did try to orchestrate this a different way. I think they were very intentional about having Japanese Prime Minister Takahichi come right before the Trump meeting was supposed to happen with President Xi. So they had tried to, and even when they did the meeting in Busan last year, they had tried to orchestrate in such a way that it did look more like a conventional US swing through the region, where you go to a major multilateral meeting. They did make a point of going to Japan, and Takahichi had just been elected at that point, and then have the meeting with Xi Jinping in South Korea. So I think they tried my senses that the contingency surrounding the war on Iran kind of ended up on doing that. But I do think bracketing that important caveat about how they tried to orchestrate this differently, I do think it captures something really essentially and fundamentally different about how the Trump administration is handling China and contrasted with full disclosure how we handled it in the Biden administration. I think they just have a different theory of the case, or at least the president does. This is very much an inside out approach to dealing with China, that we are going to focus on dealing directly with Beijing first and foremost, and then we'll figure out the other pieces on the chessboard, either concurrently or provide the reassurance that we need to on the side. Whereas, I think the theory of the case in the Biden administration was an outside-in approach. I think enough people had enough scar tissue from frustrating interactions in engaging with the Chinese and recognize it can feel like talking to a wall sometime or feels like you could write the other side's talking points for them, which is the little maybe boost from chat GPT, and that that's not going to be productive and fruitful. The real way you get Beijing to adjust or change its behaviors to work around them, especially by dealing with our allies and partners in the region, because Beijing does have those underlying anxieties about being encircled. And that that's a much more effective way to engage Beijing than going just tete-a-tete, mano-a-mano, whatever you want to call it. So I think it's a very different theory of the case, and it's almost like we're getting a natural experiment in which one ends up being more effective. Yeah. I mean, you could almost say that to go back to this managed trade concept, it's an alternative way of dealing with this problem of the frustrating elements of trying to do real negotiations, sub-intip negotiations with China. Whereas in the past, US administrations, I mean, going back forever, would have these long, painful conversations that didn't go anywhere about the structural problems in China's economic model of growth that caused distortions, job loss, deindustrialization around the world, you know, non-market policies and practices, and the terminology of our US trade representative friends. And the Trump team seems to have decided that there's no point in pushing that. I mean, maybe that's a convenient way to frame it. I mean, they were pushing those issues until they kind of lost the trade war and decided to refocus on a more tactical set of considerations, but whatever we are, where we are. And so if they've determined that, you know, it's not worth it to have these kind of endless conversations where China's never going to make any real concessions on their model of growth, then you could have like a more Biden-oriented approach of fine, we'll work it out with our allies instead, and you can adjust. Or you have more of this Trump-oriented approach of kind of like a carved out space for negotiation to say, okay, we're not going to solve the problem, but we're going to identify certain sectors where we can make tactical arrangements to, without solving the problem, at least reduce imbalances. But then that will quickly create weird dynamics with the allies again, I would think, because if we have this board of trade, if it is established, whatever it is, and say, okay, so we're going to lower tariffs on areas that aren't national security sensitive, but we don't have any commensurate mechanism with allies who are also facing high tariff rates, then you start to collapse the spread in the tariff rate on allies and on China in a way that I wonder it could have like a very inadvertent, but significant effect on broader investment flows in the region. Yeah, I think that's right, right? If you end up bringing the differential tariff rate with China on enough goods, then there's no reason to kind of force supply chains to go around rather than through China, which undermines I think the Trump administration's theory of the case. But I think you're right, I think that is probably where they landed after getting such pushback from the Chinese side. And I think it's instructive what's happened already even without the board of trade. I will hear Trump administration officials defend what happened in the aftermath of the trade, and say, look, say what you want about it and the climb down. The net result is that Chinese exports to the United States have gone down significantly. I think it's somewhere between 20 and 25 percent if I recall correctly, and they say that's reducing the trade imbalances. The problem with that argument is the alliance piece of it, because where has all that trade gone? A lot of it's gone to Europe. The numbers for Chinese exports, and there are other deeper factors that are also contributing to this too, have gone up by double digits, it seems like every single quarter. So there's kind of a displacement effect. It's like pushing down on a balloon, the pressure's got to go somewhere, the goods got to go somewhere, and a lot of them are getting diverted to our allies. And I think if you're going to get a handle on some of these questions, if you really wanted to put pressure on China, you would need to have a unified front, I think, with our European allies and a lot of the other countries that are suffering the knock-on effects, because I am skeptical of the notion in the wake of Mark Carney's speech in Davos that the Middle Powers really can form their own coalition and push back in a meaningful way against China. I mean, China seems to think that whatever pushback they're getting from the European or other allies' government, it's like a toll on the highway. How much does it cost? I can afford to pay it and keep going. And apparently, that was the message they were sending loud and clear at the China Development Forum. We're going to keep focusing on export and going gangbusters on exports. What about counter-narcotics? In some ways, I think that the Trump administration's leverage on this was a little diminished since they were so focused on using tariffs to try to extract concessions on them. And of course, the Supreme Court blew up the remaining tariffs that we had imposed on China. And those tariffs were intended to build leverage to get China to do more to prevent the flow of precursor chemicals that make fentanyl, that fuel the opioid crisis in the United States. And over the years, we've seen China occasionally make deals with, I think, actually all of the past three administrations. So Trump won had a fentanyl deal, Biden had a fentanyl deal more recently at Busan. We got a fentanyl deal. And we keep getting these deals because China keeps turning off the cooperation when they're unhappy with the direction of the relationship. But it seems like in comparison to Busan, you didn't hear as much of fentanyl as a priority on the US side, but it was in their readouts still. It was in the readout. They did discuss it. And then the week before the meeting, the Chinese side had highlighted a drug bust they had made, which I think they were calculating that that would appeal to the Trump administration and, and mollify them ahead of the meeting. I mean, I think my sense has been sometimes what the Trump administration has really wanted from China, in addition to actual substantive cooperation on it, is they want some kind of visible sign that they can point to, right? They kind of want the classic drugs and money on the table, like when the DEA or the FBI does a big bust and they have something tangible that they can point to. And it seemed like China was willing to do a little bit of that more recently. You know, I think the real question is there had been some cooperation, like you had said, at the end of the Biden administration after very fitful and challenging efforts to get that underway. And then that went sideways because of the tariffs. So I don't know if we would have ended up in the same position that we're currently in, if we hadn't taken this long detour, if we just took a long detour that precluded even more progress on the set of issue. And the fact that this keeps coming up over and over again shows, number one, just how challenging it is. But number two, like you said, how fitful Chinese cooperation is on the set of issues. So this is one summit. It looks like we may have three more between Trump and Xi over the course of the year. Trump announced in his remarks in Beijing that he was inviting President Xi to the United States on September 24th of this year. And I can't imagine they would announce such a specific date if that wasn't already effectively accepted on the Chinese side, though in China's announcement, they were a little more cautious. I think they said the fall for the timeline. So you have that, then you have the possibility of Trump going back to China for the APEC summit and then the possibility of Xi coming back to the US for G20. Though, to be honest, it's very difficult for me to imagine Xi especially coming to the US twice in one year as he's been trying to cut back his travel schedule so significantly. So I would love your thoughts on that cadence of summits, what it means, I mean, whether or not the meetings happen, the idea of the meetings, you know, as a structuring function for the relationship, what that means going forward, because you have the explicit outcome that have been announced, maybe they'll be more announced in the coming days. But then there's just the question of how the two sides calibrate their policy decisions on the basis of having yet another meeting and yet another meeting. And there's always a conversation about positive atmosphere and what that means and whose responsibility it is to achieve that atmosphere. So how does that look to you? Well, number one, light a candle for our friends who are still in government and our successors. I am deeply not jealous. Yeah, exactly. Their quality of life and sleep. Yes. Yes. Right. That has been one of my takeaways from watching the summit from the outside now is that these are much more fun to opine on than to actually staff. So setting that aside, you know, I think that number one, establishing that cadence of meetings and signaling it so loudly and early from the US side in the wake of Busan, you know, the argument from Secretary Besam was that this would have a stabilizing effect on the relationship. Right. And there's some merit to the argument, but I think the downside as we saw play out in this summit is that it really provided a huge disincentive for the Chinese to offer much in the initial engagement that they would want to hold off for some kind of potential future engagement, especially because I think what is driving a lot of China's calculations vis-a-vis the United States is just our own domestic calendar. Right. Like it's not that they think in terms of dynastic cycles, they have outlook like the rest of us when they agree to the supply chain ceasefire on rares. They could see that a year out, it would be our midterm elections and that Trump would probably not want his, one of his signature deals to unravel around the time of the midterms. And I think my sense is from talking to my Chinese colleagues is that they are calculating that they will get more bang for the buck with whatever concessions or whatever purchasing agreements they do make to the Trump administration as we get closer to the midterm elections. I think that may have been an inadvertent on the side of the Trump administration. Right. That by saying you want to do multiple meetings, right. It actually pushes things further down the road and makes it more challenging to get those concessions from China, especially because I think the economic fallout from the war in Iran has only accentuated China's calculations that they can afford to be withholding and that Trump will want more as we get closer and closer to election day on our side. So I think that is an important point as far as the cadence of the meetings, as far as whether or not we'll actually get to three, I don't know, maybe we should have like, you know, some kind of betting pool or something. Probably shouldn't joke about that, but it's, I'm skeptical, right. These are guys who are both septuagenarians, right. The president's going to be 80 next month. And I'm skeptical that they're just going to make the schlep across the Pacific that many times. So it seems like a state visit that seems more likely just given the fact that President Trump uttered it publicly, right. And I've heard chatter about this from the Chinese side as well that they are planning to do that. But APEC and the G20, I think those are going to be heavier lifts both because, you know, they might just be tired. But the other important point again is our midterm election, right. And I would assume that the Trump administration and his team will be very preoccupied with either the run up to the election or the aftermath of the election and sorting through that rather than focusing on China necessarily. And I mean, that's been true not just of this administration, that's been true of past administrations as well. Yeah. And this is always a problem because the big Asia summits are all in the fall. Yes. So every two years we have midterms or presidential election. I know you experienced very, very directly working southeast Asia. Especially when I was doing Southeast Asia and trying to explain to our Southeast Asian friends yet again that I swear we did not schedule our elections during an ASEAN summit as a sign of disrespect. But nonetheless, it is unlikely the president will leave the country at that time. You don't think it was part of the framers calculations? My personal assumption is probably not. Yeah. The other point about the cadence of meetings to or at least the potential for them to have multiple meetings, it also goes back to this back to the future theme. What Beijing is in effect doing is populating the calendar with a series of quote unquote sensitive periods where it would be inadvisable for the US to take any kind of competitive action or anything that's going to bother the Chinese, right? So export controls or tightening up existing export controls, anything along those lines, they're going to try to use those approaching meetings as a way to push back against the United States doing that. Or I think the big issue that's really on the table is the next Taiwan armsale, right? There was so much talk about whether or not Trump would make some kind of shift into declaratory policy. But my sense was the Chinese were much more amped up about the prospect of another giant armsale dropping after the two leaders met, right? People will recall that right after the two leaders met in Busan at the end of last year in December, the Trump administration announced an armsale to Taiwan in excess of 10 billion dollars, which I think was the largest effort. And as the Trump administration like to point out, bigger than all the Biden administration armsales combined. And it was good armsale too, right? There was a lot of good kit included in that package. But I think the Chinese are very exercised about that possibility because it would be embarrassing for Xi Jinping and are looking to foreclose that possibility. And I imagine they will try to use the calendar to foreclose that. Just to briefly take a doubles advocate perspective on this. So we have this large, arguably historic armsale approved in the end of last year with, to your point, a lot of really important capabilities that will support Taiwan's defense. But a lot of anxiety now about the leverage China may be able to apply to postponing future sales. But can Taiwan even buy more weapons in the near term? And can we produce them fast enough to actually deliver meaningfully beyond the package we've already approved, at least in the very near term? It's a really good question. I don't know. I mean, just for them to, I think it was only been within like the last couple of weeks, right? That Taiwan's legislature even made the funds available for the first armsale package. Do they really have the capacity, especially in their own fragmented political environment, to ingest another giant armsale? I don't know. I wonder if part of why this issue seems to rank so highly on China's priorities is the symbolism as much as the operational reality of it. I think they don't like the symbolism, especially because what it does, part of what they get hung up on too, is the size of it. I could see a universe where the kind of subtext is, if you guys break it up, that would be preferable to dropping a giant armsale package on it. Because I think from the Chinese perspective, when you have such a numerically large armsale package, it violates the third communique from the Reagan administration, which says that armsales to Taiwan are going to diminish over time. And so we've seen this in the past. And the US perspective being that they would diminish, commensurate to the threat Taiwan's facing. Yes, exactly. We like to argue about that. Exactly. Right. But we have seen this play out in past administrations, right, where they get very hung up on the numerical size because they're being unusually legalistic about how they're interpreting the third communique in particular. Because I think you're right, there is an underlying issue of how much can we actually produce. I think there's already a backlog on the US side and how much can they actually ingest. And I think a lot of it is about that. It's the symbolism. And we see this before too, right? Where the symbolism is really what China gets hung up on. We even saw it with the Pelosi visit in 2022, where they literally go ballistic and are launching a fly-fire exercise. When Nancy Pelosi visits, largely a symbolic gesture that doesn't really change the status quo from a separate branch of government. But then when the Biden administration did a billion dollar arms sale just a couple of months after that, there was very little except for kind of standard to March again. Probably could have been written by chat GBT about it. So they tend to respond more to the symbolism than the substance. So we're still in the very early hours following the summit itself in Beijing. Going into the weekend next week, what are you going to be looking for as signals from both sides to get a better understanding of what really happened in these meetings, especially the private sessions that we don't get to see out here? Yeah. I mean, this administration has been more disciplined than the first Trump administration about precluding leaks and that sort of thing. But I think what I will be on the lookout for is they seem to be going full bore and engaging with the press. So I will be looking very closely at the statements from the US side. I think the other thing to look out for is like we said earlier, there was such a misalignment. It's almost like watching a Kurosawa movie, like there's different, it's like, were they in the same meeting? And to see if there is any actual alignment between readouts from the two sides. And I think that'll be one of the key things to look out for. And then when you get into the nitty gritty about what was actually promised or may have been promised in terms of any kind of purchasing agreements, I was joking at the end of last year, I felt like at some points I went from being a China analyst to being a commodities trader in Chicago, where I'm closely tracking soybean purchases and sales to the United States. So we will probably unfortunately have to do that kind of medicinal research as well. We're all soybean traders now. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Really core part of our expertise and what we studied in school. But I think those are going to end up being the things that we should be on the lookout for. In particular, two in terms of alignment, we noted some of the things that were unrequited by the Chinese side. But one of the things that really stuck out to me as being a big ticket item that the Chinese side is really touting is what she articulated as both sides agreeing to a new vision for constructive strategic stability, which just rolls off the tongue. Like, you know, they must have a bunch of madmen working for them inside the CCP to come up with these phrases. It seems like they picked up strategic stability from the US. I think so. And then tried to own the term. But they seem to be very focused on that. And this seems like, you know, putting old wine in new bottles. This sounds like new type of great power relationship. Again, another back to the future moment. And I think what listeners should be mindful of is this is a trap. What they're trying to do is use this seemingly innocuous rhetorical device to try to bind the United States and say that competitive actions that we might pursue or things we might do to support our allies or to support our partners like Taiwan, at those would be officiating any kind of agreement about having constructive strategic stability. So they are looking for a way to try to box in the administration. I think the administration, I don't, we don't know what was said behind closed doors, but to its credit, we haven't seen that claim from the Chinese side corroborated in any way from the US side. And I think it would be a mistake to publicly or even privately sign up to something like that. Because what the Chinese are trying to do, some of it is about boxing in the US, but some of it is also about sending a signal to third parties, right? If we publicly sign up to it, there is this third party audience effect always in this engagement. They want to be able to say to the rest of the world, to the global south, to other countries, we had stability in the relationship, we're not the ones who broke it. It was the Americans. It seems innocuous on the face of it. Yeah, that makes sense. We want to avoid a Thucydides trap, but it's a trap. It's a different kind of trap. Well, I have to wrap there, John. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Henrietta. To learn more about John's thinking on US-China relations, you can check out his Barn Affairs article, How She Played Trump, Beijing gambled and is now reaping the rewards. For more context on the summit, especially the economic and commercial elements, you can tune into yesterday's peckingology episode with Phil Lach, who runs the economics program here at CSIS. For a behind-the-scenes look at how US-China Summetry really works, you can check out our episode with Sarah Barron, former White House senior director for China. From late last year, we'll link those in the show notes. And as always, we would love to hear what you thought of today's conversation. Do you want more emergency pods or less? Never again. Both perspectives, welcome. Send your ideas to peckingology at CSIS.org if you haven't already. Please rate, review, and subscribe to the show, and we'll be back in your feed very soon. If you enjoyed this podcast, check out our larger suite of CSIS podcasts. You can listen to them all on major streaming platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Visit CSIS.org slash podcasts to see our full catalog.