'You Don't Kill Americans & Get Honored At The White House': Chang Reacts To Trump's Reception Of Xi

0:02Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me once again is Gordon Chang. He's a political commentator and author of Plan Red, China's Project to Destroy America. Gordon, thanks so much for coming back on. Oh, well, thank you, Brittany. Chinese President Xi Jinping was welcomed to the nation's capital this week with a lot of pomp and a lot of circumstance for his first visit to the White House in over a decade. And President Trump and the First Lady met him on the tarmac. He was greeted to a military flyover as the national anthem played on. And from there, he was treated to a red carpet experience, both literally and figuratively.

0:40You're less than impressed with how the summit played out. You called it a big waste of time on social media. So to start off the conversation, what are some of your takeaways? Well, the important thing was that the substantive part of the summit was less than two hours. And when you take out translation, it means that meaningful conversation was less than an hour. You also probably got to take off another 10 minutes because China ranted on Taiwan as they normally do. So you put all that together. I'm not sure how much substantive conversation there was. Now, we'll have to wait until Monday when the White House will reveal the results on trade.

1:22President Trump, in his tea with Xi Jinping today, actually said that there are going to be some ag buys, so farmers are going to be happy. But we'll just have to wait. I just don't think that we saw very much in the way of progress. And especially, you know, the Chinese were really hesitant on extending the trade truce. It was extended for only two months from November 10th to January 10th. Secretary Besant was happy with that, but I think he wanted more. We will get into all the issues, but first on the symbolic perspective, what do you think this does in terms of not only President Trump and Xi's relationship, but the US-China relationship?

2:06Because President Trump was heaping on the praise to Xi. I want to read some things he said. He said that they both forged a truly great friendship that was built on mutual respect and the vital interests of our people. And then Xi, he announced that two pandas are going to be coming to the Atlanta Zoo in the coming days. And he said this gesture shows the, quote, friendship between the Chinese and Americans. So what do you think this shows or this summit, the past 48 hours, shows for their relationship? Well, first of all, I think that Xi Jinping came here not to engage the United States. Really, he came here for the televised images.

2:42They're beamed back home. They will show President Trump honoring Xi Jinping. And I think that bolsters Xi's position. There have been hints and there have been things that have indicated real turbulence in the Chinese regime as purges continue. And that can't be good for the Chinese leader. So I think he came here for basically political, internal political purposes. You know, while Xi Jinping was talking about mutual cooperation, we had these Chinese thugs, probably Ministry of State Security, all decked out in identical kit. They had the masks over their mouths. They had sunglasses on and they were beating Americans on American soil.

3:27And in one particularly disturbing incident, these guys were coming out of the Chinese embassy. And when they were challenged by police, they retreated back into the embassy. So, you know, this is not mutual respect. This is an arrogance, which is really, really troubling because it shows the Chinese mentality. They don't respect the United States. They don't respect President Trump. They think they can do anything they want to Americans on our own homeland, in our own homeland. In turn, what do you think this shows about President Trump? Because not only was he very flattering of Xi, he also, he said that these were made for television moments, but there wasn't that much coverage of him domestically, I think as he would have liked, because there was limited TV coverage because the major television networks suspended their pool coverage of the event in solidarity with the outlets that President Trump banned.

4:25So do you think that helped or hurt President Trump that there wasn't as much coverage there? Well, ultimately, I think that it helped President Trump because this ceremony was, you know, looked offensive. Remember, this is a Chinese regime that provided targeting data to Iran, resulted in the deaths of six American service members on March 1st in Kuwait. You know, there obviously was intensive diplomacy. But on July 17th, China again provided targeting data to Iran. That resulted in the deaths of three Americans, this time in Jordan. You know, so the idea of honoring the Chinese leader who is coming in here and killing Americans, I just don't think that plays very well politically.

5:14What do you make of that timing, especially because we are still in the war against Iran. As you said, there's reporting that China is helping Iran when it comes to the war. China is a huge trading partner with Iran. It is the biggest buyer of Iranian oil. What do you make of the pomp and circumstance and all of this pageantry when that's in the backdrop? For me, it's just inappropriate. The United States should not be honoring those who, as a matter of deliberate policy are killing Americans. And then, of course, there's the addition of support that the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, where you had about 1 ,300 flights of dual-use equipment from China to Iran in the first six months of this year.

6:06and then you have fentanyl, 48 ,000 deaths last year. That's a project of the Communist Party. This is horrific. And the president of the United States needs to start defending Americans because protecting the lives of Americans is his number one constitutional priority. And I don't care how much he thinks he needs China. You don't kill Americans and get honored at the White House. I want to get your take on how David Perdue, he's the U.S. ambassador to China, characterized how the Iran portion of this summit went. I'm going to read a quote, and the them means China. We made it very clear to them weeks ago that any help that they would give Iran, whether it be direct or indirect, whether it be intelligence or parts or military equipment, was totally unacceptable.

6:55President Trump made that very clear again yesterday. Do you think that that's enough? Of course not. I mean, we've been hearing these words for months about China's assistance to Iran. And this comes not just from Ambassador Perdue, but also Treasury Secretary Besant. The United States needs to impose costs. The Chinese are ignoring our warning because they don't respect us, Brittany. And that means we need to do some things that President Trump might find distasteful. But if he doesn't do them, we know that this will continue, that China will continue to support Iran. And some of those things, for instance, would be invoking Section 311 of the USA Patriot Act to declare Chinese banks to be a primary money laundering concern.

7:42We know that they're not only handling Iran's money, but Chinese gangs have taken over the global money laundering business because they use China's state banks. We've allowed them to run money through New York. And this is, again, unacceptable. But you don't see the Treasury Secretary hitting the Chinese banks. There's all sorts of things that we need to do. And until we do them, you know, David Perdue can say whatever he wants, but it's meaningless. And the Chinese are just disrespecting us because they think we don't have the political will to back up our words. And more importantly, to enforce our own laws.

8:24Let's talk about what is probably the biggest issue for China, and that is Taiwan. Because according to state-run media out of China, she apparently said that he wants President Trump to, quote, handle the Taiwan question with prudence, and he hopes the United States is going to oppose Taiwan's independence. What are your thoughts on that reporting that's coming out? This is sort of reminiscent of what happened in May in Beijing. We heard this from Secretary Rubio. And this is standard operating procedure whenever American and Chinese leaders get together. There will be an initial 15 or so minutes of China ranting about Taiwan.

9:05And the American delegation just sits there and just says, OK, whatever. Let's get on. And after the Chinese finish, then the Americans say, well, OK, let's continue the agenda. So probably that's what happened this time as well. So, you know, I don't think there's going to be a change in American policy on Taiwan. Yes, the Xinhua readout of the meeting between Trump and Xi said that Xi hoped that the U.S. would declare that we oppose independence. But I just don't think that's going to happen. What do you make of a potential reaction? What would you want to have seen from President Trump when Taiwan came up and was part of that conversation?

9:51I think that President Trump should say the United States will defend Taiwan. And he needs to say that in public as well. We say that the Chinese are not going to invade the main island of Taiwan. And the reason is that they will not accept the casualties that would result from that. You know, we saw this, Brittany, when China launched a surprise attack against India in Galwan in the Himalayas in June of 2020. The Chinese attacked Indian positions. India immediately announced that 20 troopers had died. This was June of 2020. And then in China only admitted casualties in February of the following year.

10:34And they said there were four, even though both India and Russia have said that China probably suffered 45 casualties on that night. So if they were worried about 45 casualties, they'd be worried about the God knows how many casualties that an invasion of the main island of Taiwan would result in. I want to now turn to artificial intelligence, or as President Trump now calls it, super intelligence, because he said that that was going to be a big topic of discussion in this meeting. And in the past couple of weeks, he said repeatedly that we are leading China and the rest of the world when it comes to AI.

11:15And he said he wants to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins. China and the United States are the two global leaders when it comes to this type of technology. And President Trump said that he said that both Xi and himself want to leave AI exactly where it is. Our guardrail is the DOJ. What do you make of President Trump's commentary surrounding AI and how he has positioned it in the conversation with China? I think President Trump is 100 percent right on AI. And I assume that in his private conversations with Xi Jinping, he was 100 percent right on his dealings with China on this. This is, the United States is ahead of China.

12:02Yes, our frontier models are only, what, four or five months, six months ahead of China's frontier models. But we know that China has been distilling our models in order for them to release that. But also, we've got enormous leads in AI infrastructure, specifically compute and in chips. So in compute, in April, we saw that Stanford report that the United States had 5 ,427 data centers. And how many did China have? China had 449. We know that this is a real limitation on China because Moonshot AI, which is that Chinese company, stunned the world with Kimi K3 in July. Great AI. But the problem is that Moonshot had to reduce or limit subscriptions to Kimi K3 because they didn't have the compute.

12:55So the United States has really important leads, and President Trump is right. We've got to win this thing. So I like that. The one thing I don't like is just a smidgen. You had Treasury Secretary Besant say, well, let's have an agreement on AI notification. This is if there's an incident has national security implications, China will notify us or will notify China. The problem is that that agreement is completely unenforceable, and it's unrealistic to think that Chinese are going to tell us about problems with one of their AI models. So this is going to be a one-way agreement. You know, people have likened this to the military hotlines.

13:34Yeah, we've got a military hotline with China, but they don't pick up the phone. So what's the use of a communication link? You know, and this is important because, for instance, if I can go on here for just a second, you know, in 2023, when China floated that balloon over our nuclear weapons sites, Defense Secretary Austin picked up the phone to talk to his Chinese counterpart. And what happened? Silence. So, yeah, it would be nice to have an agreement with China on AI, but it's just not feasible. I think that's a really interesting point because I've had a few conversations this past week and everyone said there needs to be a framework agreement eventually between the United States and China.

14:18And due to the timeline of the summit, they didn't think it would happen. But I'm curious, how much would that agreement mean or matter if China doesn't hold up their end of the bargain? Yeah, we do not need to give China the time to catch up, which is what an agreement would do. So this is not in our interest. I think President Trump knows that from the comments that he's made recently. So I'm not too worried about this movement for an AI agreement. This is important. Yes, there are real concerns about AI. We know about these incidents that Anthropic, for instance, has talked about and others.

15:01But the point is, you can't have a global agreement. You can't have an agreement with China. It's just inherently unenforceable. At least during the Cold War, you know, people say, well, Cold War, we had nuclear weapons agreements with the Soviets. But you can count warheads. I mean, yes, there was a problem, but it was at least possible. You can't do that with AI. Are we going to have an American Department of Justice official sit down with every Chinese AI developer? I don't think that works. That's just not going to happen. I now want to ask you about a different moment that we saw play out when President Trump was showing Xi around the White House and he was showing him different presidential portraits.

15:48He got to his headshots, pointed them out. In between them was a photo of the auto pen. And he goes, that's the auto pen. Everyone starts laughing, she included. And he goes, that's Joe Biden. He hits him on the arm playfully. What do you make of that moment? What do you think that signified to Xi that he's hearing President Trump make fun of a former president to a foreign leader? I thought it was amusing, but I did not like that moment. And the reason is we know that China tries to divide Americans. And President Trump should not have had that auto pen picture there in the first place. I would have liked President Trump to have said to Xi Jinping, yes, I've got disagreements with my predecessors and with people in the Democratic Party, but we are a united people and we will stand against a common enemy.

16:40That's what we needed to hear. I hate boiling something down to something so simple, but when you're looking at this summit, at the past 48 hours, who are the winners and who are the losers? Would you say the ultimate winner is Xi? Is President Trump the loser then? What does that look like to you? There were some good moments here. For instance, President Trump is taking Xi Jinping to the National Archives, show him the Constitution, Declaration of Independence. I love that. I love the idea of gifting Xi Jinping an eagle, which represents American freedom. That's terrific. But on balance, on balance, the Chinese won this.

17:26And they also won May. And I think that this should have been the last time that we really give the Chinese an opportunity for intensive dialogue. You know, we have had intensive dialogue with the Chinese since the early 1970s. That's more than a half century. And although it sounds like it should work, it's produced some pretty horrible results for the U.S., especially recently. So what we need to do is stop talking to the Chinese and start imposing costs. We impose costs. We at least have a chance of a better relationship. I'm not guaranteeing that. But what I can guarantee is that if we continue our present trajectory, we're going to end up in failure because this policy has failed for more than a half century.

18:14And that means we got to try something new. My last question to you then is where would you like to see our relationship with China go from here or the next steps from the Trump administration? Let's say President Trump was watching this conversation right now. How would you advise him? I tell him his first responsibility is to protect Americans. And this is not only in the Gulf, but also in our own homeland. He needs to break up the Chinese networks on our soil, which are extremely dangerous. He needs to start defending our country. Xi Jinping talks about going to war all the time. He is mobilizing Chinese society, not only the military, but also civilians.

19:01President Trump needs a similar conversation with the American people. You know, you look at the polls for Iran, the Iran war, and they're very low, showing disapproval. And I can understand that. I think President Trump was right because of the danger that Iran posed. But I can understand the American people not supporting it because they have not been given a reason to support. Americans will sacrifice when they have a reason to. They will not sacrifice if they think that this is just peacetime. We are at one of the most dangerous points in history in our country, and the President of the United States needs to communicate that.

19:42If he doesn't communicate that, we will not defend ourselves with the urgency required. We are in a very dangerous moment. Gordon Chang, I always appreciate your commentary and your insight. Thank you so much for letting here today and I hope to speak with you again soon. Well thank you so much Brittany I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you.