How Trump’s grovelling emboldens China and imperils the Asia Pacific

September 29, 2026 — 5:00am

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China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is achieving what the celebrated ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu declared to be “supreme excellence” in warfare.

That is, he’s “breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting”. Donald Trump is delivering advantages of historic consequence to China – free.

Apart from a pair of pandas and the fact of the visit itself, Xi declined to give Trump any concession during their three days of summitry in Washington at the end of last week.

Xi still hasn’t delivered fully the trade measures he promised to deliver Trump at their last meeting, in May. Or the one before that. Or even from Trump’s first term.

China’s president wouldn’t give his host even the smallest satisfaction. For instance, Trump wants to rename AI “superintelligence”. He thinks this will make it more acceptable to American voters.

He bragged that Xi agreed with him: “Like almost everyone else, he seemed to like calling the poorly and inaccurately named Artificial Intelligence to a far more accurate and important name, SUPER INTELLIGENCE. That would be ‘SUPER!’,” Trump posted.

But no. When Xi spoke of the subject, he ignored his host’s wishes and called it AI. In every reference.

Much of the commentary is that Xi’s three days of summitry with Trump was “all symbolism, no substance”. In reality, it was a triumph for the Chinese Communist Party and its leader in both symbolism and in substance.

To start with, Trump walked away from more than 100 nation leaders at the UN in New York to host Xi about 350 kilometres away in Washington.

“These last few summits”........

© The Sydney Morning Herald