By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

How Xi Played Trump

Although U.S. President Donald Trump promised to unleash an economic fusillade on China after his return to the presidency, Beijing has enjoyed a remarkably strong year of diplomacy. The Trump administration resurrected and expanded its first-term trade war with Beijing, claiming it would use trade negotiations with other countries to put pressure on China. Yet Beijing has hardly been isolated internationally: in the months leading up to his October meeting with Trump in South Korea, Chinese leader Xi Jinping hosted a gaggle of foreign heads of state for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit and a military parade. Nor has China yielded in the face of U.S. threats. After spending much of the year simply reacting to U.S. policies, Beijing went on the offensive, imposing an expansive export control regime on the supply chains for rare-earth elements just weeks before the meeting with Trump. And although the Trump administration has exhorted Beijing to make sweeping structural reforms to its economy, Xi has doubled down on his techno-industrial economic ambitions for China’s next five-year plan—a plan that, according to analysts, could exacerbate global trade imbalances by expanding China’s share of global manufacturing even further. Whereas most countries targeted by Trump’s tariffs have rushed to the negotiating table, China has instead dug in.

China has gained, not suffered, from this obduracy. Xi has secured Trump’s commitment to several meetings in 2026, as well as concessions from the administration on incredibly contentious issues: Taiwan and U.S. export controls. By every measure, China is diplomatically, strategically, and technologically better off than it was a year ago. In contrast, the Trump administration’s strategy, which has lurched from attempts to clobber China economically through tariffs to attempts to mollify China through serial concessions, has achieved little. Beijing has been neither cowed nor assuaged. The United States seems less able to either reassure or deter China; Chinese officials have learned that the Trump administration, for all its bluster, will not follow through on its promises or its threats.

China’s decision to retaliate rather than capitulate reflects an important difference between Xi and Trump. Unlike Trump, whose perceived dealmaking acumen is central to his political identity, Xi is not interested in striking a grand bargain. As a result, Beijing has tied Washington up in relatively marginal commercial negotiations, with Xi happy to string Trump along while deflecting U.S. pressure on the challenging issues at the heart of the relationship.

Beijing has weathered Washington’s escalatory onslaught. The White House now risks finding itself in the worst of all possible worlds, with a confused China policy that ensures friction but lacks a disciplined approach to competition, a negotiating partner in Beijing that has conceded little while steering Trump back to the status quo ante, and a year of theatrics that has produced no tangible gain for the United States.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, October 2025

 

Always Be Conceding

During the first Trump and the Biden administrations, China’s responses to U.S. tariffs and export controls and the tightening alignment between Washington and its allies and partners were remarkably muted—until late 2024. At that point, Beijing began responding to a slate of U.S. technology controls imposed by the outgoing Biden administration with countermeasures of its own, likely in preparation for a second trade war with the incoming Trump administration.

Since returning to the White House, however, Trump’s China policy has seen-sawed between hostility and engagement. The administration announced its “Liberation Day” tariffs in April, which ultimately escalated to a 145 percent penalty on Chinese goods—a de facto embargo. Then, after the United States and China agreed to de-escalate the trade war in May, Washington took a few modest competitive actions at the margins, including closing loopholes in U.S. export controls that China had been exploiting. But the Trump administration then went out of its way to make substantial concessions to Beijing following negotiations in June. Washington ultimately eased its export controls on advanced semiconductors, reversing the decision to ban the sale to China of Nvidia’s H20 chips, whose sophistication fell just below the legal threshold for triggering U.S. export controls. According to The Wall Street Journal, in the run-up to the October meeting, Trump considered discussing with Xi the sale of Nvidia’s cutting-edge Blackwell chips before the U.S. president’s advisers cautioned against it.

That risky outcome was avoided, but another has become apparent. The latest trade truce, in which China postponed its own expansive export controls, set a pernicious precedent by vitiating the Biden administration’s tenet that export controls are off-limits in negotiations with Beijing because they are meant to safeguard U.S. national security. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has also pulled back its support for Taiwan, pressuring Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te to cancel a planned transit through the United States and offering scant moral support as Beijing has continued its pressure campaign.

Moreover, the administration’s single-minded prioritization of trade has led it to sweep other, thornier points of diplomatic contention under the rug. Strategic issues have fallen off the agenda, including China’s intensifying pressure on territories in the South China Sea claimed by the Philippines and its wide-ranging Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon cyber-intrusions into U.S. digital infrastructure systems. Long-standing U.S. concerns about China’s egregious human rights abuses have receded far into the background, a notable shift from the first Trump administration, which shined a spotlight on the gross mistreatment of the country’s Uyghur minority. Indeed, the second Trump administration appears content to let Beijing off the hook rather than hold it accountable—as long as Washington can claim it has made a splashy deal, regardless of how shallow, narrow, or fragile that deal might be.

In the aftermath of the South Korean summit, it is difficult to discern where and on what issues, if any, the United States is competing with China in any meaningful way. The administration deserves some credit for taking long-overdue steps to mitigate U.S. exposure to China’s chokehold on rare-earth elements and processing. But weaning Washington off its reliance on Chinese-refined critical minerals will likely be a longer and more arduous process than the administration admits. Beijing’s agreement to pause its restrictions on some rare-earth exports for a year could lull the United States, its allies, and the private sector back into complacency in the meantime.

In fact, the tactical concessions Beijing has made to Washington have simply returned bilateral relations to their pre-Liberation Day status quo ante, a tolerable, if not entirely comfortable, position for Beijing. China has demonstrated flexibility in the implementation of its export control regime, realized just how much leverage it has over Washington and global supply chains, and lost little by employing its new export controls. The cost of this bounty was negligible. The Trump administration’s decision to defer enforcement of a U.S. law mandating the sale or ban of TikTok and instead include its fate in trade negotiations further enhanced Beijing’s position, giving China a bargaining chip it could trade away at little cost to its own interests.

The TikTok case reflects Beijing’s diplomatic tactic with the second Trump administration: whittling down the scope of the discussions from the major strategic issues at the heart of U.S.-Chinese relations to relatively narrow commercial issues ancillary to the competition but of outsize importance to the Trump administration and its key constituencies. That senior U.S. officials have been haggling with their Chinese counterparts over TikTok, rather than meaty and long-standing concerns about China’s unfair, nonmarket practices, is a coup for Beijing.

The same logic applies to China’s pledge to buy soybeans from the United States. Trump held the deal up as a significant concession extracted from Xi in South Korea, even though soybean exports had not been a major trade issue in recent years. By narrowly construing discussions with Washington as commercial negotiations, China ensnares U.S. policymakers in a game of whack-a-mole in which Washington, distracted from addressing the major concerns about China’s economic policy that ostensibly animated the Liberation Day tariffs, must beseech Beijing for relief on specific issues as they arise. The Trump administration has repeatedly taken the bait, seeking headline-grabbing “wins” rather than any advance in the arduous, unglamorous process of gaining leverage over Beijing.

 

Playing For Time

But Xi remains focused on the long-term strategic competition, even if Trump is not. While Trump considers himself a consummate dealmaker, Xi prefers to bide his time until he can strike at his opponent and manage any fallout. He took a calculated risk that he could roll out expansive export controls on rare-earth elements prior to the summit; he wagered that such a gamble would not prompt a U.S. response because Trump was so keen to make a deal. That gamble paid off.

When Beijing looks at Washington, it observes not the United States’ lack of leverage but rather its domestic dysfunction. Chinese analysts recognize that Washington has cards to play; it could, for instance, cut off China’s access to important supply chains that run through the United States. But China believes that the Trump administration will not take such steps because it is too wary of the domestic backlash that might follow the pain caused by any Chinese economic retaliation. Xi arrived in South Korea having just demonstrated his political dominance at home by purging a number of senior officials and outlining his five-year vision; Trump arrived having presided over the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Already, some Chinese scholars assess that the Trump administration will cede more leverage to Beijing in the coming year because of economic headwinds from inflation and greater domestic political pressure following Democratic victories in state and local elections in 2025.

Beijing is likely planning its diplomacy with the Trump administration around next year’s midterm elections, betting that Trump will be anxious to secure a deal he can tout on the campaign trail in support of Republicans—and that in his eagerness, he may end up making significant concessions. Trump’s hunger for a deal led to the end of the trade war in his first term in 2020, which concluded with the rather paltry and largely unimplemented Phase One trade agreement. The Trump administration is keenly aware of the Phase One agreement’s shortcomings, most notably that Beijing did not follow through on its purchasing commitments, but so far that has not precluded Washington from seeking new deals with China.

Xi’s objective is to keep Trump invested in his game of whack-a-mole. In doing so, Xi risks frustrating Trump. The president could lash out and unleash his administration’s China hawks, who have otherwise been muzzled since senior U.S. economic officials began their intermittent dialogues with Vice Premier He Lifeng in May.

That prospect, however, appears unlikely in the coming months. By proclaiming on social media that he intends to meet with Xi three times in 2026, Trump surrendered one of his most important bargaining chips: the prospect of presidential engagement. Beijing, which will want to hold any possible concessions in reserve to keep Trump locked into the future engagements to which he has already committed, has little incentive to cede ground to Washington. Time is Beijing’s greatest asset in this negotiation—and by publicly committing to these meetings, Trump has given Xi more of it.

 

Deal Or No Deal

For all its shortcomings, the Trump administration’s attempts to mollify Beijing have been a useful natural experiment about whether concessions to Beijing can purchase a rapprochement or even a détente. The evidence suggests that Beijing has little interest in reaching a détente. Despite making significant concessions on two of the major issues at the heart of U.S.-Chinese tensions in the past decade—Taiwan and technology controls—the Trump administration has gotten exceedingly little from Beijing in return. China is pocketing U.S. concessions, identifying new points of leverage over the United States, and using the tactical truces to further fortify itself for the long-term competition with Washington. The line between détente and appeasement is always a thin one, but the ready rebuke of appeasement—that it invites only more requests for concessions, if not more aggression—appears to be bearing out.

The Trump administration, with its maladroit attempts at diplomacy and erratic shifts in policy, might appear ill-equipped to pursue a détente with China. But Trump has already demonstrated his unique capability to break the consensus on China that he himself ushered in during his first term without facing political blowback. For all his early missteps, Trump could yet shift U.S. policy if he were truly committed to pursuing a détente and willing to expend political capital to do so.

The true obstacle to a more enduring rapprochement is not the Trump administration but Beijing. Xi is not interested in a big deal or a détente because he judges that time is on China’s side, that China will be in an even stronger position in the years to come, and that a deal now would only constrain Beijing. Moreover, Beijing views the constituent elements of a deeper détente, such as arms control negotiations, which Trump pursued in his first term, with suspicion, seeing in them the same stratagems that Washington successfully deployed against the Soviet Union to prevail in the Cold War. The idea that China’s leadership seeks stability in the bilateral relationship has become a truism in Washington, but that assessment is inaccurate at best and misleading at worst. Instead, China’s actions since Trump’s return make clear that Beijing wants to constrain the United States’ ability to push back against China.

The United States still has points of leverage it can use against China. But the strategic incoherence of Liberation Day, the subsequent de-escalation of the trade war, and the administration’s efforts to mollify Beijing ahead of the South Korean meeting have led China to conclude that Washington is not prepared to escalate. To the extent China does want a stable equilibrium, it wants to get the United States accustomed to a new one—on Beijing’s, rather than Washington’s, terms. A year into the second Trump administration, it has made startling progress toward that objective.

 

 

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