Xi Ascendant

That said, the summit was still disappointing for the United States at both the strategic and tactical levels. Trump accepted a framing of the relationship that better suits China than the United States and helps China consolidate the considerable gains that it has made over the past year. Although it is still too early to conclude, as Xi has argued, that “the East is rising and the West is falling,” given China’s momentum, Mao Zedong’s dictum, “The east wind is prevailing over the west wind,” may be more accurate in the near term.

The summit signifies two dramatic turns, one in the long arc of the United States’ China policy and the second in Washington’s currently ineffectual negotiating skills. Trump traveled to Beijing as the leader of a diminished power, brought about as much by the administration’s own debasement of the country’s sources of power as it was by China’s persistent efforts at self-strengthening.

The just-completed summit stands in sharp relief to the visit that then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan made 42 years ago in late April 1984. Although he also praised China’s leaders and was optimistic about ties, the orientation of the relationship and relative power balance was quite different.

In his toast at the welcoming banquet hosted by Premier Zhao Ziyang, a reformist who would be removed from power following the Tiananmen crackdown in June 1989, Reagan stressed the positives of an economically developed China, saying, “As China moves forward to modernize and develop its economy, the United States is eager to join in a cooperative effort to share the American capabilities that helped turn our country from a vast wilderness into an industrial giant.”

Reagan was happy to talk of stability, framing it as a way to balance against an aggressive Soviet Union. “It will be the trust between us that will keep us and the world at peace,” he said, saying at an stopover in Alaska on the way home that the United States was not trying to “impose our form of governments on” China. He noted optimistically that he had witnessed the “injection of a free market spirit” in its economy and that the United States could cooperate with “with this so-called Communist China.”

Essentially, he was suggesting a case that would go on to be elegantly made by others throughout the next two decades: that China’s economic reforms and integration into the global economy were reshaping the regime’s foundations and tempering its aggressive impulses, thereby expanding areas of cooperation and narrowing the areas of contention with the United States.

Such idealism and optimism! How times have changed.

China’s market reform era is over, yet it is now the industrial giant, not the United States. China has long since stopped siding with the United States to balance against Russia, and it’s Beijing, not Moscow, that Washington fears most in the long run. Few in the United States agree any longer with Reagan’s sentiment that a strong China is in Washington’s national interest.

Last year, the Trump administration’s approach to that problem was one of familiar aggression with no eye to stability: On April 2, 2025, which Trump called “Liberation Day,” it launched a revolution aimed at remaking the international trading system by imposing astronomically high “reciprocal tariffs”—arrived at through astrological math—against its trading partners. This gambit dramatically backfired in the wake of China’s counteroffensive, particularly its effective weaponization of rare earths, which forced the United States to lower tariffs and commit to imposing fewer export controls against China.

Equally important, the United States’ abandonment of a rules-based system and cooperation with its allies in defending that order means that it also gave up vital resources and leverage to push back against Chinese misbehavior. Similarly, the attack against Iran has both at least temporarily damaged U.S. military preparedness and lowered the bar on the justifiable use of force, which subtly raises the odds of Chinese military action in the Taiwan Strait. Although the United States still claims to pursue “fairness and reciprocity,” those principles now rest on sand, defined only by the arbitrary views of U.S. officials at any one moment and what they are willing to settle for during negotiations.

As a result of the United States’ weakened state and chastened ambitions, Trump was left to seek an accommodation more on Beijing’s terms than on Washington’s. Just as he did last year, he again invoked the idea of the “Group of Two” (G-2), but when the eminent scholar C. Fred Bergsten coined the term in the mid-2000s, he meant to suggest that the United States and China would “provide joint leadership of the global economic system,” not simply reach a modus vivendi between each other and divide the world’s spoils between them.

The two may now be more equal than before, but neither is interested in providing global public goods. And the notion that a bromance between Xi and Trump could yield a stable condominium is even more fanciful than the idea that engagement would comprehensively bind China’s hands to follow the rules of a game set by the West.

With the big issues off the table, all that was left was an incredibly shrinking space for negotiations over a specific set of items. Contrast these talks with the much more expansive negotiations over China’s entry to the World Trade Organization a quarter century ago or the bilateral investment treaty in the late Obama administration—or even the “Phase One” trade deal reached in 2020. A few days after the ink had dried on that arrangement, a U.S. official in a celebratory mood privately claimed to this author that the deal would serve as a precedent, and that the United States would be able to henceforth impose unilateral agreements on Beijing whenever it wanted. Another illusion.

Even if one were to accept the Trump administration’s own generous fact sheet and the president’s remarks made aboard Air Force One on his way home, and not the more vague initial statement of “preliminary results” from China’s Ministry of Commerce or its subsequent more detailed list, the United States got little more than a pile of beans.

The newly announced Board of Trade will aim to identify about $30 billion worth of each other’s exports on which officials can apply lower (or standard) tariffs, representing only about 15 percent of the two sides’ total trade in goods in 2025. The Board of Investment is even less well defined, with no clarity on whether it will handle disputes related to existing investments or be a vehicle to screen and regulate new investments.

The announced sales of agricultural goods will help farmers in the short term, but won’t make up for the decline of U.S. agricultural exports to China during the most intense years of trade tensions (2017-19 and 2025), as China has diversified its import sources. The sale of 200 Boeing aircraft, a figure that China later confirmed, is less than the long rumored figure of 500, which explains the drop in Boeing’s stock right after the announcement.

China did not score any major new commercial wins either, but given its success in blunting the United States’ reciprocal tariffs and export controls, simply avoiding a reescalation of U.S. pressure counts as success. China’s Ministry of Commerce emphasized in its statement that the Washington promised that as long as the cease-fire is in place, it would not raise the total value of its tariffs on China above the level agreed to in Kuala Lumpur in October 2025, regardless of the results of the United States’ ongoing Section 301 investigations.

The oddest non-outcome of the summit concerned the lack of new sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips. The Trump administration approved their sale a few months ago under the impression that there was significant Chinese demand for these chips. But Beijing has yet to approve the purchases, perhaps hoping that it can either negotiate the price down or that there will soon be sufficient domestic alternative supplies. Only in this upside-down era could what started as a U.S. export-control restriction that upset Beijing become a Chinese market-access problem frustrating the United States.

Although the U.S. president brought with him 17 titans of American business, they essentially served as background decoration. The United States could have given true meaning to its push for reciprocity by highlighting in discussions with the Chinese side the unequal levels of market access that several of the companies faced, such as Meta’s Facebook (compared to ByteDance’s TikTok app) and Visa and Mastercard (compared to China UnionPay). And it could have noted how Chinese industrial policy is tilting the playing field in China and other markets against leading U.S. tech firms, such as Apple, Tesla, Micron, and now apparently Nvidia.

Trump also could have reinforced the message of U.S. technology leadership by visiting the production facilities of almost any of these companies. Better yet, he could have breathed life into the announced artificial intelligence safety protocol by organizing a roundtable with government and business representatives to discuss the various risks that AI poses and potential mitigation strategies. But doing so would have required more advanced planning, a less distracted administration, and spending more time on the ground—even if not Reagan’s six days, more than just two.

In early April 2025, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent chastised China for retaliating against the administration’s reciprocal tariffs, arguing that with its weak macroeconomy, China “was playing with a pair of twos.”

Yet despite soaring debt, persistent deflation, and rising unemployment, China has played its hand quite well. By contrast, despite low inflation (until very recently) and high economic growth, the Trump administration has stumbled badly in its dealings with Beijing. So far, China’s confidence in figuring out how to manage Trump has been borne out.

Of course, past earnings do not guarantee future returns. In the coming weeks, the two sides will attempt to put more meat on the bones of the agreement announced in Beijing. And it is possible that Trump and Xi will meet three more times this year, between a return state visit by Xi to Washington in September, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ meeting in Shenzhen in November, and at the G-20 summit in Miami in December. Despite the superficial veil of predictability, we should expect substantial levels of gamesmanship by both sides in the coming months as each seeks to expand its leverage and gain an advantage.

That said, regardless of any individual moves, unless the Trump administration aims for a full reset—and develops substantial new negotiating skills—it will be hard to dislodge China from its favorable position. Despite all of China’s challenges, when it comes to the bilateral relationship, the wind is likely to remain at Xi’s back for the foreseeable future.