The president has shifted the foundations of American policy toward China, throwing aside the adversarial approach of recent years.
In 2024, Donald J. Trump said China was “killing us as a country.” Last year, he complained that President Xi Jinping of China was “very tough, and extremely hard to make a deal with.” His tariffs on China reached 145 percent at one point.
The whiplash that followed culminated in the pageantry in Beijing this week.
As Air Force One took off from the Chinese capital on Friday, it remained unclear what deals, if any, President Trump had clinched with Mr. Xi. But the two-day summit in Beijing underscored how far he has shifted the foundations of American policy toward China in the wake of his humbling retreat from last year’s trade war. He has thrown aside the adversarial approach of his first years in office, the Biden administration and the beginning of his own second term.
What’s more, he has largely waved aside the warnings outlined in the Pentagon’s annual, unclassified accounting of China’s capabilities and intentions, which lays out a plan to push the United States out of the Western Pacific, engulf Taiwan, claim more territory in the South China Sea and escalate cyberattacks on the United States. He acknowledges that these threats are real. He has just reversed his view of how to deal with them.
In Beijing, Mr. Trump clapped for Chinese children waving American flags, toasted the “special relationship” between the American and Chinese people, called Mr. Xi a “great leader” and exclaimed that the garden where he walked with Mr. Xi held “the most beautiful roses anyone’s ever seen.” When Mr. Trump introduced the Chinese leader to the 17 or so American executives who came to Beijing, he said they had joined him “to pay respects to you, China.”
Mr. Trump said nothing in public in Beijing about Taiwan, even as Mr. Xi sharply warned that disagreement over the self-governing democracy could lead to a “clash.” Mr. Trump boasted of big Chinese purchases of Boeing airplanes and soybeans, though details were slim — just his own accounting of his wins, conveyed to reporters on Air Force One soon after liftoff from Beijing. Mr. Xi’s government did not confirm the purchases.
