U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in Beijing on Wednesday for talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the Iran war, trade and U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, with the summit’s main talks set to begin Thursday. The meeting laid bare the familiar arrangement at the top: two states, two ruling classes, and a population left to absorb the consequences of their bargains, their threats and their weapons deals.
China gave Trump a red-carpet welcome after Air Force One landed in the Chinese capital, with a military honor guard, a military band and about 300 Chinese youths waving Chinese and American flags and chanting, “Welcome, welcome! Warm welcome!” as Trump headed to his limousine. The pageantry did its usual work of manufacturing consent, wrapping state power in ceremony while the real business of domination waited behind closed doors.
Who Gets to Decide
Trump was greeted by Chinese Vice President Han Zheng; Xie Feng, China’s ambassador to Washington; Ma Zhaoxu, executive vice minister of foreign affairs; and the U.S. envoy to Beijing, David Perdue. Trump told reporters as he departed the White House on Tuesday, “We’re the two superpowers,” and added, “We’re the strongest nation on Earth in terms of military. China’s considered second.” He also said, “We have a lot of things to discuss. I wouldn’t say Iran is one of them, to be honest with you, because we have Iran very much under control.” In another comment before leaving, he said, “We’re going to have a great relationship for many, many decades to come.”
Those remarks came as Trump’s popularity at home was weighed down by the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran and rising inflation as a consequence of that conflict. The costs of imperial conflict and economic strain land far below the level where the decisions are made, while the people making them speak in the language of control and long-term partnership.
Trump was seeking a win by signing deals with China to buy more American soybeans, beef and aircraft, and said he would be talking with Xi about trade “more than anything else.” The Trump administration hoped to begin establishing a Board of Trade with China to address differences between the countries and help prevent the trade war ignited last year after Trump’s tariff hikes, which China countered through its control of rare earth minerals. That led to a one-year truce last October. The whole setup is a reminder that the bosses in government do not end conflict; they manage it, package it and call the result stability.
What the Powerful Call Stability
Taiwan was also expected to be a major topic. Trump said Monday he would discuss an $11 billion weapons package for Taiwan that the U.S. administration authorized in December but has not yet begun fulfilling. The package is the largest ever approved for Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party’s news outlet, People’s Daily, said in an editorial ahead of Trump’s arrival that Taiwan is “the first red line that cannot be crossed in China-U.S. relations” and “the biggest point of risk” between the two nations.
Trump also intended to raise the idea of the U.S., China and Russia signing a pact to set limits on the nuclear weapons each nation keeps in its arsenal, according to a senior Trump administration official who briefed reporters ahead of the trip. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House. China has previously been cool to such a pact. Pentagon estimates put China’s arsenal at more than 600 operational nuclear warheads, while the U.S. and Russia each are estimated to have more than 5,000 nuclear warheads. The last nuclear arms pact, the New START treaty between Russia and the United States, expired in February, removing caps on the two largest atomic arsenals for the first time in more than a half-century. As the treaty was set to expire, Trump rejected a call by Russia to extend the two-country deal for another year and called for “a new, improved, and modernized” deal that includes China. The Pentagon estimates China will have more than 1,000 operational nuclear warheads by 2030.
The nuclear numbers are the language of organized catastrophe, handled by officials who treat mass destruction as a negotiating position. The public gets the warning labels; the states keep the arsenals.
Business, Chips, and the Boardroom Route
Trump traveled with aides, family members and business leaders including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk. While en route to Beijing, he posted on social media that his “first request” to Xi would be to ask the Chinese leader to bolster the presence of U.S. firms in China. He wrote, “I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction, to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic, and help bring the People’s Republic to an even higher level!”
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng met on Wednesday to discuss economic and trade issues at Incheon International Airport, just west of Seoul, according to the Chinese state-run Xinhua News Agency. Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser on Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said China appeared to be entering the meeting from “a much stronger place.” He said China would like to reduce tech restrictions on accessing computer chips and find ways to reduce tariffs, among other goals, and added, “But even if they don’t get much on any of those things, as long as there’s not a blow-up in the meeting and President Trump doesn’t go away and look to re-escalate, China basically comes out stronger.”
That is the real arithmetic of these summit rituals: trade restrictions, tariffs, weapons packages and nuclear limits are shuffled between states while workers, consumers and everyone else are left to live with the fallout. The leaders call it diplomacy. The machinery calls it order.