The Promise And Peril Of U.s.-china Summitry

The Promise and Peril of U.S.-China Summitry

What Xi Wants From Trump—and Trump Might Get From Xi

Robert D. Hormats

May 13, 2026

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Article link: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/promise-and-peril-us-china-summitryhttps://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/promise-and-peril-us-china-summitry

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This week’s long-awaited summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping may be among the most consequential encounters between leaders of the two countries since President Richard Nixon met Chairman Mao Zedong in 1972. I played a role in planning that earlier summit as senior economic adviser on the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger; its historic success depended on both the meticulous preparation of the two leaders and their top officials and the clarity and precision with which they stated their positions and resolved their differences. Although that history may not have shaped the Trump administration’s preparations in recent weeks, Chinese officials have no doubt studied those lessons in their own preparations—and incorporated them into their plans for Xi’s discussions. As Kissinger once remarked, “Everything ever said to me by any Chinese of any station during any visit was part of an intricate design.”

I met Xi Jinping for the first time a quarter century after Nixon’s meeting with Mao. At the time, I had not heard a lot about Xi, who was then the party secretary of Zhejiang, a midsize coastal province. But soon after we were introduced (by Wang Qishan, a party official who had befriended Xi when both were laboring in a rural village during the Cultural Revolution), I could recognize his self-confidence and determination to rise in the party and overcome the obstacles that stood in his way. Such confidence and determination remain now that he is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao—and is essential to understanding his approach to the United States generally and to his encounters with Trump in particular.

TWO COUNTRIES, TWO SYSTEMS

The United States and China approach summits with different objectives, strategies, and negotiating styles. The Chinese believe that progress on virtually any issue at a summit requires months of thoughtful negotiation by senior officials beforehand; otherwise, important agreements, much less major breakthroughs, at a two-day meeting are nearly impossible.

Chinese officials recognize that Trump’s often unpredictable approach presents unique challenges to Xi and to those advising him. In their view, a summit’s key outcomes should be embedded in a draft communiqué, or at least a few precisely worded written agreements, crafted well ahead of time by senior advisers, leaving no room for misunderstanding or conflicting characterizations in the aftermath. They also see this as allowing sufficient time for deep and personal discussions by the two leaders in the meeting itself. Chinese leaders also traditionally pay careful attention to what their American counterparts say, assuming—rightly or wrongly—that U.S. officials, and especially the president, take care in choosing their words, which are meant to reflect a long-term, well-thought-out strategy.

The Chinese bring such a long-term perspective to their own preparations. During my visits in the early 1970s, Chinese officials would frequently remind me not just of statements by Mao from earlier years but of decades of history that had shaped their views. Mao himself was focused on a long-term project of generating the strength that would allow China to resist U.S. pressure. “Our goal is to catch up and surpass the United States,” he had said, and only then “can we finally breathe easy.” That thinking has persisted to the present, with Xi stressing his determination to ensure “that no foreign power can obstruct China’s restoration of national pride through wealth and power.”

In my early conversations with Xi, he showed a deep interest not just in economic and financial issues (I then worked at Goldman Sachs) but also in Chinese history—topics that have come up in additional conversations over the years. I’ve been especially struck by Xi’s focus on the essential role of the Chinese Communist Party in building and sustaining Chinese strength. Getting into the party had been difficult for Xi, whose father was a revolutionary leader yet frequently subjected to persecution and purges during Mao’s rule. Xi applied eight times before being admitted to the CCP Youth League, and then ten times before becoming a full CCP member. Rather than becoming angry and discouraged, however, he became all the more determined to prove his loyalty. In an interview years later, he summed it up in one sentence: “The knife is sharpened by the stone.”

Xi was also focused on keeping China from suffering the same fate as the Soviet Union, and on learning the right lessons from its fall, which he studied closely. He noted the Soviet Union’s failure to maintain party unity, its inability to build a diversified economy, its reliance on very few trade partners, and its vulnerability to American economic pressure—and stressed that Chinese strategy must be centered on averting such weaknesses. That objective continues to underpin many of his policies: his focus on ensuring a strong CCP with a strong leader, his emphasis on self-sufficiency and avoiding vulnerability, his preparation for long-term competition with the United States, his determination to build a wide variety of trade relationships. All of these grew out of the thinking that took shape in those earlier periods.

THE LONG GAME

In his meeting with Trump, accordingly, Xi may see short-term value in exploring “mutually advantageous economic relations” but will not let such rhetoric or agreements obscure his long-term objectives for China, his doubts about U.S. reliability, or his wariness about leaving China vulnerable to U.S. leverage.

Xi will ly strike a careful balance when it comes to the war in Iran, an issue not on the agenda when the summit was originally planned but that will be front and center this week and help set the tone for the discussions more broadly. Xi recognizes that China and the United States some common interests in the Middle East, such as the unfettered flow of energy and freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, and he will want to avoid a confrontation with Trump on Iran. But he will not give up either a close relationship with Tehran or the opportunity to take advantage of the economic and political fallout from the war.

Chinese officials see a tension in the Trump administration’s rhetoric on a broader set of foreign policy issues. Last year’s National Security Strategy approvingly notes the “outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations,” supposedly “a timeless truth in international relations”—suggesting interest in a world defined by spheres of influence, in line with Xi’s own calls for a global order based on “a new type of great-power relations.” Yet Xi is also aware of the focus reflected in the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy, with its declaration that the Indo-Pacific will continue to be the “key economic and political battleground” and require robust U.S. “deterrence.”

When great powers misunderstand one another, the dangers quickly grow.

Xi will want to tease out Trump’s thinking on what these mean, especially when it comes to an Asian sphere of influence centered on China and on U.S. policy toward Taiwan. Conscious of how politically divided the United States is, how controversial and unpopular the Iran war has become, how fractured U.S. relations with its allies are, and how stressed the U.S. defense industrial base has been, Xi may see an opportunity to further extend China’s military presence in the South China and East China Seas and further probe the naval and air space around U.S. allies in the region, testing the United States’ ability and will to respond.

Xi’s approach on economics will also reflect his long-term objectives. For example, he is keenly aware of Trump administration claims that by relaxing restrictions on some technology sales to China (especially semiconductors), Washington can deepen Chinese dependence. In the wake of Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick’s boasts about making China “addicted” to American technology, Xi’s suspicions have no doubt intensified. Any loosening of restrictions on the sale of critical minerals will ly be temporary at best; Xi will ultimately want to retain his leverage in this area under any circumstance, especially if he has doubts about the longevity of trade or other U.S. commitments.

If Trump raises the “structural imbalances” that his administration argues are a major source of America’s trade deficit, Xi may offer limited measures to buy more American products, and even sign on to the proposed Board of Trade, but he will resist fundamental structural alterations in China’s economy. As in the past, Xi will ly agree to cabinet-level talks to chip away at the imbalance through more purchases of U.S. products, but these will, at best, make limited progress, not a large or permanent reduction in the trade imbalance. In return, he will want a moratorium from unpredictable U.S. sanctions. The public outcome will ly be to lower the bar for claiming agreement on the issue, allowing a temporary stabilization of the economic relationship without major changes to the fundamentals. Such temporary stabilization will allow Trump to claim success and focus on problems elsewhere (from Iran and the Western Hemisphere to the economy), and Xi to focus on China’s own domestic challenges.

THE CASE FOR CLARITY

There are other areas in which there may be room for some agreement. Controls on fentanyl precursors is one. Another could be a mutual commitment to productive discussions on artificial intelligence. When Kissinger traveled to China at the age of 100, not long before his death, he told me beforehand that he had insisted to Chinese officials that AI be a significant part of any discussions he had—reflecting his own belief that dealing with the “new strategic reality” created by advances in AI was not unthe imperative of dealing with the “new strategic reality” created by the advent of nuclear weapons early in his career. So far, there have been some limited official discussions focused on AI, as well as Track II interactions involving business leaders, scholars, and former officials. China and the United States have very different perspectives on many of the key questions raised by AI. So even a mutual willingness to begin regular high-level discussions on these questions would be meaningful.

When great powers misunderstand one another, the dangers quickly grow. The United States and China are engaged in a multidecade economic, political, technological, and strategic competition. Managing this competition depends on the leaders clearly stating their objectives and accurately understanding what the other side has agreed to, and what it has not. If the summit ends with clarity and understanding, it will represent a step forward. But if it ends with different interpretations of key discussions, with disputes about the meaning of agreements, or with illusory claims of progress, the result will not just be a lost opportunity but added risk—leaving the relationship between the two superpowers worse off than it was going into the meeting.

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