Unpacking Trump’s Upcoming Trip to China

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]He went there in his first term, but it's always a big deal whenever a president goes to China particularly now what those two countries, United States and China, are considered the undisputed heavyweights of the American geopolitical scene.

[00:00:14]It's an interesting thing the president loves having relationships with world leaders that carry over and I've reported on Asia my whole career and on President Trump's attitude towards Chairman Xi since his first term and the president will frequently praise him as he'll praise many world leaders including Vladimir Putin. He likes to show respect and is one of the areas where President Trump intuitively understands something big about Asian culture. Face is an enormously important concept in Asia. You have to allow your your adversaries in business or politics or whatever it is in geopolitics to have face, to save face, to not be embarrassed. And the run-up to this meeting which has been rescheduled once because of Iran has put the Chinese in a position they don't love being in. They don't love disorganization. They don't love lack of clarity of what the schedule's going to be. They like the whole thing to be scripted really and the US just doesn't play that way in general as much as the Chinese but certainly as compared to to Donald Trump. So there are just some big differences here. First of all the time difference makes a huge difference for people in the United States journalists covering the summit producing content from Beijing but also for coordination.

[00:01:29]Xi will have all his people there who matter and can coordinate on the on the time difference.

[00:01:36]The president will have a big team with him but they'll also have to coordinate back with Washington. So that's one big difference. The cultures are so different. President Trump is very confident on the world stage. We've all seen that but he'll be dealing with a different kind of culture and the Chinese for instance are you think the president of the United States is rough on the media. The Chinese are extremely rough on the media And so on a trip like this, you can expect to see at times the Trump administration, maybe there's some irony here, standing up for the White House press corps.

[00:02:07]These are also different types of leaders. As much as they seem to get along and of course she had a long-standing relationship with Joe Biden as well. They're on different time horizons. President Trump is out of office in a couple years no matter what. And she can go for I don't know say forever. But there's no end date on his time in office and that dovetails with the big difference between the political cultures of these two countries. The US thinks about this year, next year, maybe a year beyond that. The Chinese think in 10 years, 25 years, 100 years. And that patience, like cultural patience, is is an advantage for them in most cases because it means they're not in as big a hurry. There's no midterm election coming up that's going to be decisive for Xi's time in office and that gives him I'd say an asymmetrical advantage.

[00:02:57]Another big difference is the goals going into this summit. The United States cares about the economics. They want to have more investment, more business activity in China for particularly things like financial services. They want to sell the Chinese stuff including Boeing airplanes. And so there'll be a lot of prominent CEOs on this trip trying to be part of the end of the summit and the agreements about economics. US cares about security for the world and of course about AI. AI is going to be on the formal agenda at this summit. It's unprecedented historically to have this kind of prominence, but the US would like to see a lot of coordination for the threats from AI that threaten both the United States and China according to my sources. And of course the United States cares about human rights, China less so. And then lastly the US cares about Iran, although my sources are skeptical that this meeting will produce a lot of Chinese help on solving the current problem. What does China care about? Well, the US says China cares about Taiwan and trying to move the United States towards a softer view of the reunification between Taiwan and communist China that the Chinese would like to see. As I said before, China cares about stability in the summit, order, certainty. They'd like to see that in the world. So, they don't like the tariffs coming on and off. They don't like disruptions in the relationship.

[00:04:21]They want to be able to plan carefully.

[00:04:23]And of course, China cares about world dominance. And the United States would like to check China.

[00:04:29]In the end, this summit will be almost certainly covered as if it's about Iran, but I don't expect from my sources much Iran progress. It'll be about economics.

[00:04:37]That's what will dominate. Both countries want want to figure out a way to have win-win in the relationship.

[00:04:44]Scott Bassitt is a key figure at this summit. Treasury secretaries typically are not as front and center at a summit like this as Scott Bassitt will be because he's really the point person for the relationship between the two countries and he deals with his counterparts in China at a very high level to set up this summit. It's going on for a while to set this up and to think about how you make the relationship less tense, make the United States less reliant on China for things like rare earth minerals and and other things that that the United States would like to decouple on medicine.

[00:05:20]But also to have a productive relationship. They don't want this to be so adversarial that it dominates and occupies the American military budget, the American diplomatic bandwidth. So, you'll see a lot of symbolism, a lot of pomp and circumstance the Chinese will roll out lots of red carpets for President Trump and extraordinary banquets. But let's focus as as I always do for these summits, what are the deliverables? And while my sources are not optimistic that there'll be a settlement the a meaning related to Iran there can always be surprises. We'll watch it the president will be there for the rest of the week takes off Tuesday afternoon and a long flight and then heads into summitry.

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