Trump returns from China with stability and a stalemate

President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing this week may have produced modest results by the standards of US-China summits but it highlighted a clear benefit for China: after the extremes of last year’s trade war, the countries have reverted to their familiar economic and strategic standoff. Two days of talks between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping underscored that even after Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and the ensuing trade detente the two sides reached late last year, Washington and Beijing are still locked in the contest that Trump inherited when he started his second term. For the United States, that means that the most troubling aspects of the relationship — from what it considers Beijing’s mercantilist trade policies to its efforts to increase its military clout in the Indo-Pacific — remain largely unaddressed. But for Xi it offers some breathing room and a return to a more predictable set of challenges. He appeared to describe the change this week with a new framework for the countries’ relations he called “constructive strategic stability.” Trade War Truce China came out ahead, given the retreat from the Trump administration’s brash approach on trade from early 2025, said Scott Kennedy, a China expert at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Compared to where we were a year ago, with 145pc tariffs and the US really trying to push China and the rest of the world to fundamentally change, we’ve had a counterrevolution and we’re back at stability,” Kennedy said. Trump brought to the Thursday-Friday summit some of America’s most powerful executives, from Tesla’s Elon Musk to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, but most had little to show for their time, aside from a lavish banquet. The meeting also did not secure any public commitment from China to help the US end the war in Iran that has roiled global markets and dented Trump’s approval ratings. “The summit projected stability but it left the stalemate intact,” said Craig Singleton, a China ex