អ្វីដែលកិច្ចប្រជុំកំពូល Trump-Xi នឹងមិនអាចដោះស្រាយបាន

 A Conversation With Orville Schell

The conclusion of the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping marks the culmination of a turbulent moment in U.S.-Chinese relations. After a year of escalation and retaliation, including across-the-board U.S. tariffs and Chinese export controls on rare-earth minerals, both sides left the meeting touting success in stabilizing the relationship. But with the major underlying disputes between Beijing and Washington still unresolved, the future of the competition between the world’s two most powerful countries remains in flux.

To understand the implications of the first U.S. presidential visit to China in nearly a decade, Dan Kurtz-Phelan, the editor of Foreign Affairs, spoke with Orville Schell, one of the United States’ foremost Sinologists and the Arthur Ross Vice President of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. Schell had traveled to Beijing for the summit. Over a decorated career as a journalist covering China and as an attendee of many previous presidential summits, he has developed an equally granular and grand-historical understanding of the interactions between U.S. and Chinese leaders.

Schell and Kurtz-Phelan spoke on the morning of May 15, just hours after Trump had taken off from Beijing. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. A full audio version of their exchange can be found in The Foreign Affairs Interview, the magazine’s podcast.

You were on the last presidential trip to China when Trump went in 2017. As you’ve watched Trump and Xi this time around, how does their dynamic seem different or the same to you? How have you read their body language and the symbolism of their encounter?

Trump kept emphasizing that he has known and been a friend of Xi since his first administration. And he likes to and did tout the fact that he is the American president that has known Xi for longer than anyone else. So he fancies himself an old friend of Xi and was very effusive in his expressions of respect and appreciation of Xi, which I think was very gratifying to the Chinese leader. The Chinese government and even Xi himself often utter the mantra of “We need to have mutual respect and understanding.”

In various previous administrations, because of the nature of the Chinese political system and the rights violations and theft of intellectual property, that measure of respect was not really conferred. But I think the way Trump treated Xi was quite admiring and I would say very respectful, if in a somewhat transactional and some might even say synthetic way. But I think it did work its magic in a certain sense.

How did you read the Chinese reception, both the preparations for Trump and then the theatrics, the choreography of the whole thing? What did that tell you about what the Chinese were trying to get out of the summit?

Unlike during the first Trump administration, when, as you recall, the China hawks were in much greater predominance, Chinese officials this time sensed that there was a certain kind of ambiguity within Trump that they needed to leverage. What makes Trump so interesting and hard to read—and also sometimes hard to deal with—is that he himself is a contradiction. He has very hawkish tendencies, but at the same time he has this mentality of, “Big leader to big leader, we should be able to make a deal and work things out.” This time, he and Xi are quite similar in that both of them do really appreciate—even crave—a sense of their counterpart expressing respect, admiration, and possibly even a little fawning. And so both leaders connected on that level. And I think it did smooth things out, and they hope that this will be a sort of a turning point, an inflection point.

Xi put forward a new framing for bilateral ties, that the two sides are going to build a constructive relationship of strategic stability. Do you see anything new in this, in terms of signals or symbolism, or is this just new tortured boilerplate that replaces the old tortured boilerplate?

Well, I think that is the aspiration, isn’t it? And I think it’s actually the aspiration of most American leaders, because there is a lot of common interest, but so far we’ve failed to be able to deploy that common interest. Whether it’s world peace, the global marketplace, climate change, pandemics—we have not been able to rise to the occasion. And you have to ask yourself, why? And it was those issues which they did not have an answer to and that they didn’t even really address in the summit.

For instance, before the summit really began, Xi made a statement on Taiwan, which is of course the big homewrecker of every U.S.-Chinese negotiation. He said that this is a matter of great importance to China and if it wasn’t handled well, it could end in conflict. But then they didn’t seem to return to it. So they kicked that can down the road again. There’s some $25 billion in two packages going through Congress for arms sales to Taiwan. We have to watch very carefully what’s going to happen to those now. It could be that our supply line is so bollixed up that we can’t get military supplies to Taiwan very soon anyway, even though they paid for the first one; maybe Trump will just quietly say to Xi, “Listen, you can count on us to slow-walk this one. Maybe I have to do the first one, but we’re not going do it in a hurry. And the second one, let’s you and I keep talking and see what we can work out.”

There may be things that still are owed that Trump has to pay in order to get a deal on soybeans. They’re going to buy billions of dollars of soybeans and 200 Boeing planes and they’re going to set up a board of trade. There are many things that will emerge in a more concrete form in the days to come. But many issues remain, such as Taiwan and economic disputes over balances of trade, which they don’t have answers for. And I think it will be very difficult for them to carry out some major transformation of attitude with these issues lying just beneath the surface and pulsing up from time to time and making it very difficult.

I was struck in Trump’s comments on Taiwan that he seemed to get strategic ambiguity, the careful phrasing of Washington’s position toward the island. This was something that Biden struggled with; he was unambiguous about the American commitment to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. Trump seemed to get it right, by contrast.

On this trip, Trump stuck to the script, and he didn’t wander off into the bog of his normal free ranging. He would do a little embroidery, but at the dinner last night, the welcome banquet at the Great Hall of the People, he actually read the speech and said things that he wouldn’t dream up himself about the longevity of the U.S.-Chinese relationship and the historical fund of amity that’s been built up. The administration has decided that it doesn’t want to have a big fight in Congress and back in the United States, so it is not going to at least immediately and overtly give in to Xi’s demand for some radical new expression, but who knows what they’re saying in private?

There did seem to be a kind of all-hands effort, both publicly and privately, to get the message to Trump not to rock the boat. It was notable that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took the lead in setting up this trip. There wasn’t a major change in rebalancing the economic relationship or anything like that, but you had much fanfare around purchases of soybeans and agricultural products and Boeing airplanes. It did almost bring to mind very old rhetoric about the Chinese market and the potential of business ties, whether from the 1940s, pre-revolution, or from the 1990s. It was a striking rhetorical return to past eras.

I think that was front and center. Trump rounded up the heads of a lot of tech companies and some finance companies, as well. This was his SWAT team, and of course Jensen Huang of Nvidia was summoned urgently at the last moment and flew his private jet to Anchorage and got on Air Force One because Trump wanted to bring as much tech world clout as he could with him. And the Chinese appreciated that. So Trump felt well-armed with some business supporters—or at least not critics. He wasn’t just an isolated figure on a summit trip. He was someone with this team.

There’s been lots of reporting to the effect that Xi is feeling great confidence in both China’s position and his own. He’ll presumably start a fourth term next year. Do you think he’s overconfident? Do you think he’s overreading some of the short-term developments and that the risk right now, both for him and for the bilateral relationship, is hubris rather than anything else?

It seems to me we’re in a world now where there’s a whole group of leaders—I would include Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Xi, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and even, at least before the recent bombings in Iran, the ayatollah—that have great pretensions of grandiosity to restore their countries to greatness. And in the case of Russia and China, that is a kind of imperial greatness, too: whether they not only flesh out the most expansive borders of what was Russia and what was China, including Tibet, Manchuria, Mongolia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the South China Sea, but also to restore it, to soothe their wounded egos that have historically waited for this moment when China would have the wealth and power to throw its weight around and be a big power itself and perhaps even earn the right to do a little bullying, as all great powers have. That’s a very powerful impulse and it does raise the question of, what’s China after? Do they want global hegemony? Could they cooperate with the United States ever again? What are they going do about the EU and Europe? In other words, what’s their version of a new world order?

If this is an inflection point, where do you think we’re heading? What comes after the inflection?

We’d have to start seeing some real concessions made by both sides. I don’t think that’s in the cards. I don’t think Xi is ready to make major concessions. He views such concessions as hallmarks of weakness. We’d have to have some kind of a conclusion to the extravagant claims in the South China Sea. Remember what former Chinese leader Mao Zedong said about Taiwan to American officials: “It’s okay if we can’t solve this for a hundred years.” In other words, he wasn’t going to let Taiwan impede other forms of cooperation. And then when former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping went to Japan in 1979 on his way to Washington, he was asked about Taiwan, and he said, “Listen, let’s leave this for smarter generations to come to solve.” And that’s a very good formula, but I don’t think Xi is capable of going to a formula like that because it would make him look weak, having professed with such militancy that Taiwan is ours, it’s a sensitive issue, and if we can’t get it peacefully, we’ll get it through conquest or through embargo or whatever.

He could surprise us, but he doesn’t seem to have that gene that codes for giving a little to get a little, which is the essence of diplomacy. Trump is not exactly a master at this either. Biden could have done it, but when China was on a roll and becoming more and more wealthy, powerful, influential, and successful, both at home and abroad, the Chinese weren’t in any mood to say, “Okay, how can we get along better? What do we have to give in order to get something?”

It’s notable to me that China now seems to be okay with the idea of putting guardrails on competition, really accepting that the relationship will be competitive, but you need to contain it in certain ways. There was a time when you would hear from Chinese analysts that it was not in China’s interest to have guardrails around competition because it would just allow the United States to be more aggressive. That does seem to be a positive development. It didn’t start with this trip, but this trip reinforced it.

Yes, I think there is a greater tolerance. They used to loathe the word competition, but now I think they’re coming to accept it much more readily. But what hasn’t gone away is their industrial policy and the recognition—and they learned this from us, actually—that everybody needs to weaponize their supply chains and needs to find chokepoints. China’s strategy remains the following: become as autarkic and independent of chokepoints from Europe and the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, et cetera, but cultivate as much dependence in those countries as you possibly can because it’s a lever.

That’s one reason they welcomed all these American entrepreneurs there today, who are all champing at the bit to get back into China. If they do, that gives China immense leverage. Once you’re dependent on China, you’re making money there, they have a lever on you. And this is a very calculated strategy that I think Xi has masterfully confected.

You’ve written so beautifully over the years about the place for humanism and the national spirit, as you put it, in China’s rise. You’ve been skeptical that the Chinese Communist Party is really a party that can allow this to develop in the way that is necessary for the rise to continue. As you’ve read the rhetoric and symbolism of this visit, how do you see that developing? Do you see interesting changes in the national spirit? Do you see it being constrained and repressed?

What made China so interesting in the 1980s, 1990s, and even early 2000s was that it was both technologically and, in a business sense, vibrant, and things were happening, but also it was a very interesting intellectual and cultural climate. Publishing, music, art, philosophy, academia, think tanks—there was a lot of independent thinking. That’s where humanism had an opportunity. But remember that, in the Marxist-Leninist playbook, the Chinese used to call humanism spiritual pollution because it is a universal value, and the Chinese to this day do not accept the notion that there are universal values such as human rights.

The humanistic aspect is precisely what Xi is missing, and it is a tragedy because China has had such a traditionally rich culture of humanistic thinking, whether it’s religion or philosophy or art, music, you name it. And that has been defoliated from the proposition of Chinese greatness, and in a way, you could say the same with the United States under Trump. You have these two guys who are very transactional, and what’s important to them is trade and money and deals and calming things down so that part of the transaction can go on. They’re not so interested in other things.

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