What Happened When Trump Met Xi |
“Beans and Boeings.” That’s what one diplomat told me that last week’s summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping amounted to, referring to proposed Chinese purchases of U.S. soybeans and airplane parts. But more broadly, the much-awaited meeting in Beijing between the presidents of the world’s two biggest economies is ripe for analysis about this century’s most important bilateral relationship.
On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Rana Mitter, the S.T. Lee chair in U.S.-Asia relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of China’s Good War. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or download the free FP Live podcast. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.
“Beans and Boeings.” That’s what one diplomat told me that last week’s summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping amounted to, referring to proposed Chinese purchases of U.S. soybeans and airplane parts. But more broadly, the much-awaited meeting in Beijing between the presidents of the world’s two biggest economies is ripe for analysis about this century’s most important bilateral relationship.
On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Rana Mitter, the S.T. Lee chair in U.S.-Asia relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of China’s Good War. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or download the free FP Live podcast. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: Rana, let’s start with your basic take. What stood out to you about the summit?
Rana Mitter: You’ve mentioned Boeings, beans, and people also mentioned beef as one of the things that are going to be exported into China from the United States. I’ll add one more B, which I think in the end may be the most important takeaway, and that’s “buoyancy.” In other words, keeping the U.S.-China relationship afloat. And for now, that’s probably good enough.
In terms of what we got out of it, as you mentioned, there are some agricultural deals. Several billions of dollars’ worth of soya and other products are pledged to be sold to China. We’ll see if that comes off. There was also a certain amount of conversation around Taiwan. And the fact that we had Elon Musk and Jensen Huang there was a reminder that tech is probably the ecology in which the U.S.-China relationship is going to develop not in the next two weeks or two months, but two decades or so. Talking about how the two sides manage AI [artificial intelligence] may be the equivalent of the conversations about nuclear weapons that so exercised Richard Nixon, Mao [Zedong], and their generation 50 years ago.
RA: I love the four Bs. There’s one element that’s connected to buoyancy that some commentators are lingering on. It was this line from [Chinese] Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in which he said the two sides had agreed to reach “a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability.” What does that mean?
RM: There are people inside the Central Party School in Beijing who are writing this kind of language to make sure that it fits in with the wider precepts of Xi Jinping’s thought, the way in which he is being projected as thinking about world order. That word “constructive” is very important. So is the word “stability.” It’s pushing an idea which I saw very strongly in the vibes from these two days: China wants to project that the United States is no longer the pivot of global order and stability. That will be China.
In other words, when we think about geo-economics, global trade, international institutions such as the United Nations—that’s where China sees its ecology developing. Talking about constructiveness and stability is actually China’s way of saying, on the surface, “We don’t want world order to change,” implying that the United States does and China’s not buying that.
But second, and this is more implied, “We do want to change what is inside that order. We want to make it much more friendly to what we regard as Chinese........