The View From the Front Row of the Trump-Xi Summit: A Conversation With Orville Schell

0:00I'm Dan Kurtz-Phelan, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview. I think it is true that what makes Trump so interesting and hard to read and also sometimes hard to deal with is that he himself is a kind of contradiction in which he has these sort of very hawkish tendencies. And on the other hand, he has this sort of mentality of, you know, big leader to big leader. We should be able to make a deal and work things out. Ervil Schell may be America's greatest chronicler and observer of several decades of U.S.-China relations. We were extremely lucky to have him in Beijing this week at a just-concluded summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, far from the first encounter between U.S.

0:46and Chinese leaders for which Schell has had a front-row seat. I spoke to him on Friday, May 15th, in the morning New York time and evening Beijing time, about how he read the interactions between Xi and Trump, what they did and did not say about the hardest and most dangerous issues in the U.S.-China relationship, and how this could mark an inflection point for the two countries.

1:18Orville, great to talk to you on your Friday night. Beijing time. Trump started his trip home a few hours ago, but I realize you've had an intense few days. It's been an intense and quite interesting few days. The president took off in Air Force One a couple hours ago, and I think the Chinese and I think President Trump were quite pleased with the outcome. You were, of course, on the last presidential trip to to China when Trump went in 2017. As you've watched Trump and Xi this time around, how does their dynamics seem different or the same to you? How have you read the body language and symbolism and rhetoric that you've seen from them?

2:00Well, one of the things which was very evident, and President Trump kept emphasizing it, and that was that he has now, as he says, known and been a friend of Xi Jinping since his first administration. and he likes to and did tout the fact that he is the American president that has known Xi Jinping or the leader of China for longer than anyone else. So he kind of fancies himself, I think, on this trip, sort of becoming an old friend of Xi, someone with some standing and was very effusive in his sort of expressions of respect and appreciation of Xi which I think was very gratifying to him. Because as you know, the Chinese government and even Xi Jinping is often sort of uttering this sort of mantra of we need to have mutual respect and understanding.

3:02And of course, I think in various previous administrations, because of the nature of the political system and rights violations and theft of intellectual property, one could go on. And that measure of respect was not really conferred. But I think the way Trump treated Xi was, you know, quite admiring. And I would say very respectfully, if in a somewhat transactional and some might even say somewhat synthetic way. But I think it did work its magic in a certain sense. How did you read the Chinese reception, both the kind of preparations for Trump and then the theatrics, the choreography of the whole thing?

3:47What did that tell you about what the Chinese were trying to get out of that and whether that Trump's sense of himself as this old friend of Xi Jinping and of China was exactly what they were going for? Well, I think they sense within Trump, unlike the first administration, where, as you recall, the China hawks were much in greater predominance within the administration. This time, I think they sense that there was a certain kind of ambiguity within him that they needed to leverage. And I think it is true that what makes Trump so interesting and hard to read and also sometimes hard to deal with is that he himself is a kind of contradiction in which he has these sort of very hawkish tendencies.

4:34And on the other hand, he has this sort of mentality of, you know, big leader to big leader. We should be able to make a deal and work things out. So in the first administration, I think the more hawkish element was evident, and he was a little less comfortable and a little less confident of his ability to sort of play Xi this time. I think in a certain sense, he and she are quite similar in that both of them do really appreciate, even crave a sense of their counterpart expressing respect, admiration, and possibly even a little fawning. So both leaders, I think, sort of connected on that level that they both were questing after the other side's expression of admiration and respect.

5:30And each of them got it from the other in spades on this trip. And I think it did smooth things out and, you know, that their hope is that this will be a sort of a turning point, an inflection point. And I think that's an interesting question. And what constitutes an inflection point is surely not just a little bononie and a little expression of, you know, mutual interest and win-win, you know, the usual brahmoids. You've been on how many presidential visits to China at this point? Do you know off the top of your head? Does it go back to Carter or before Ford even? Yeah, I started when Jiang Xiaoping came to extend diplomatic relations with Jimmy Carter, and that was quite an extraordinary trip.

6:15And then I've been on three or four others since then, an Obama trip. I went on the trip with Clinton in 98, when Jiang Zemin was party general secretary, the last Trump trip. and I went on a Bush senior trip in, I think it was 1986. And so, I mean, to watch these kinds of trips evolve has been very interesting. And also to take measure of who it is on each side that is interacting. And what becomes very obvious to me, particularly if you look at the Chinese side, I mean, the leaders from Hu Yaobang to Zhao Ziyang to Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and now Xi Jinping, they're very different people. And yes, they're all devoted to the party and devoted to the changing agendas.

7:11But we've had a very stern and militant and violent revolutionary period under Mao. Then we had this reform period, which is completely unexpected, when Mao died in 76, and suddenly Deng Xiaoping reappeared in 78 and then 79 and initiated this reform period and had that sort of astounding decade of the 1980s, which, of course, as we all remember, ended the tragedy of the Tiananmen demonstrations and massacre in 1989. And yet, when Jiang Zemin, who was appointed by Deng Xiaoping, who had been the party secretary and mayor of Shanghai, came in, reform did return. And the level of sort of friendly interaction with the United States, which came to be known as engagement, did regenerate.

8:09And so the 90s was also a surprisingly open era, despite the crackdown after 1989. And then came this sort of interlude with Hu Jintao, who was very hard to read. He was sort of almost like a blank slate. but you could see then even the turning towards China becoming a little bit more full of itself casting itself around the world throwing its weight around and then came Xi Jinping and that basically was the end of engagement because I think Xi Jinping did not support reform which was the sort of solvent that made the U.S. and China feel comfortable together. Because as long as the forum was going on, one could imagine we were converging in some manner, not rapidly and not completely, but the trend line seemed encouraging.

9:08And when that ended, that engagement ended, and then we got into this sort of much more hostile, antagonistic framework. And so I think that's what they were trying to sort of overcome in some sense in this summit, both because Trump knows we're in the era of choke points, when China has its choke points and levers it can pull against the United States, and one of them is critical minerals and rare earth and many others. And we have a few that we can pull against them, namely microchips and chip fab technologies. And so this has created a much more hostile and much more antagonistic sort of interaction where the sort of proclivity of the Chinese Communist Party to see the United States again as what they call a hostile foreign force has sort of come back.

10:08So that was the backdrop against which this meeting sort of was set. Even with that shift, are there moments that you've thought back to on those earlier visits that either because they were so different or because you see kind of echoes or parallels? Yes, I mean, certainly. Well, I mean, during the 1979 trip when Deng Xiaoping showed up in Washington, I mean, that was one of the most rapid sort of transformations of political attitude. I think I've observed that in the United States that suddenly this sort of very anti-communist Cold War mentality seemed to evaporate. And corporate leaders and even politicians were sort of slavishly interested in this strange sort of reconnection of the U.S.

11:03and China. And then Deng Xiaoping, who was a very short man, not a man of great stature, five foot four, I think, inches high. But they were suddenly forgot about all the Cold War antipathy. And they were all crowding into the White House and the National Gallery to genuflect to him. And it was a real love fest. And that sort of was the permission that both sides gave to each other, to their people, to sort of let the Cold War drift off and to try to restore a more friendly and open and constructive relationship. So I think it's those periods that Trump and Xi sort of look back to now and want to reproduce.

11:52And then, of course, there was 1972 before 1979 when Nixon and Kissinger did that incredible turnaround with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. So I think those two moments were the moments of great change and really sort of points of inflection. And I think Trump aspires to greatness and to being a great global leader as well as a great MAGA leader at home. And he looks to that and he would like to help reproduce some such moment. But as we can discuss, it's going to be quite difficult, despite the atmospherics and the optics, which are very good, I think, at this summit. But they dodged almost every issue that sort of underlies why the U.S.-China relationship over these past decades has been so fraught.

12:54Xi Jinping put forward this kind of new framing of the relationship that the Chinese language, which I believe maybe first came up in the statements ahead of dinner on Thursday, at least publicly, was that the two sides are going to, quote, build a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability as the new positioning for China-U.S. relations. I guess the shorthand is constructive strategic stability, which they were using today on Friday. Do you see anything new in this in terms of signals or symbolism, or is this just kind of new tortured boilerplate that replaces the old tortured boilerplate?

13:26Well, I think, you know, that is the aspiration, isn't it? And I think it actually is the aspiration of most American leaders because there is a lot of common interest. But so far, we've failed to be able to deploy that common interest. I mean, whether it's world peace, the global marketplace, climate change, pandemics, we have not been able to rise to the occasion. And you have to ask yourself why. And so I think it is the answer to the why question, all of the things which have divided us, set us apart, whether it's political systems, whether it's theft of intellectual property, whether it's dumping, industrial policy, you name it.

14:12And it was those issues which they didn't have an answer to, and they didn't even really address in this summit. For instance, before the summit really began, Xi Jinping made a statement on Taiwan, which is, of course, the big homewrecker of every Sino-US negotiation. And he said that this is a matter of great importance to China, And if it wasn't handled well, it could end in conflict. But the interesting thing was he said it sort of before anything happened. And then they didn't seem to return to it. Now, we don't have the text of the exact negotiations which behind closed doors, but there was no raising of that.

15:03So they kind of kicked that can down the road again. But it is still there. As you know, there's some$25 billion in two packages going through Congress for arms sales to Taiwan. One's been approved. It is at the White House just being, you know, final details being roughed out. And there's another one that I think we have to watch very carefully. What's going to happen to those now? Now, it could be that our supply line is so bollocksed up that we can't get it to Taiwan very soon anyway, even though they paid for the first one. Maybe Trump will just quietly say to Xi or has said to Xi, listen, you can count on us to slow walk this one.

15:51Maybe I have to do the first one, but we're not going to do it in a hurry. And the second one lets you and I keep talking and see what we can work out. So there may be things that still are owed that Trump has to pay in order to get a deal on soybeans. They're going to buy billions of dollars of soybeans and 200 Boeing planes, and they're going to set up a board of trade. There are many things that will emerge, I think, in a more concrete form in the days to come. But still, there are these issues like Taiwan and economic issues about dumping and balances of trade and things like that, which they don't have answers for.

16:32And I think it will be very difficult for them to carry out some major transformation of attitude with these issues sort of lying just beneath the surface and like lava vents sort of pulsing up from time to time and just making it very difficult. There was so much speculation and anxiety in American commentary and also in Chinese commentary before the visit that Xi would try to press Trump to change the American language on Taiwan's independence to say to go from, you know, we do not support Taiwan independence to we oppose Taiwan independence. And it seems that the Chinese either decided that that wasn't going to happen or perhaps they tried and didn't get it.

17:17But that seemed notable that there was so little to that effect, which suggests the Chinese had kind of lower ambitions there than we thought. I think that that's why Xi said it up front. He got it off the table, kind of, and he got a chance to let the Americans know this is no joke. This is really important to him. And I just read a tweet from Air Force One in which Trump made some expressions about Taiwan not being so important. And I think you may find him playing down Taiwan, but not doing anything so overt as to say we oppose independence or to change the balance. And Rubio did say that there's not going to be any change in Taiwan policy here in Beijing.

18:12Interestingly, you know, Marco Rubio was once a hawk. But here he was coming to China, not only as the Secretary of State, the head of the NSC Security Council, AID, and head of the archives of Washington, you know, head of everything. And in fact, he has in certain ways been reborn to follow the Trump line now of sort of deal making and acting nice and not expressing his anti-communist talk side. But that's still there. I mean, in a certain sense, Rubio is emblematic, I think, of the deeply embedded suspiciousness of China and the whole political system, the human rights questions, all of that bundle of things.

19:02And so, you know, we can't expect that just to evaporate so that a lot of talk about win-win and Trump's respect for Xi, as he expressed it many, many times, will sort of overcome to transcend some of these other things. They are not going to just evaporate. I was struck also in Trump's comments on Taiwan, I think also in Air Force One, that he seemed to get strategic ambiguity, right? This was something that Biden struggled with, as Biden would come out and say something clear and unambiguous about the American commitment to Taiwan in the event of an attack. And Trump seemed to get it right, in fact.

19:46You know, I have to say, on this trip, Trump stuck to the script, and he didn't sort of wander off into the bog of this normal kind of, you know, just free-ranging and just saying stuff. He would do a little embroidery, but at the dinner last night at the banquet, the welcome banquet at the Great Hall of the People, he actually read the speech and said things that you know he wouldn't dream up himself about, you know, the longevity of the U.S.-China relationship and the historical fund of amity that's been built up and things like that. So I think his expression on strategic ambiguity is, I think they've decided that they don't want to have a big fight in Congress and back in the U.S., so they're not going to at least immediately and overtly give in to Xi's demand for some radical new expression.

20:51but who knows what they're saying in private. You know, we'll have to see when they'll get that transcript, if we do. There did seem to be a kind of all-hands effort, both publicly and privately, to get the message of Trump from people in his own administration in Congress and elsewhere not to rock the boat here, which seems we've gotten across. It was notable that Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, really took the lead in setting up this trip. And as I read the rhetoric on commercial ties and business ties, I mean, it's, of course, correct that there wasn't, you know, major change and change in rebalancing the economic relationship or or anything like that.

21:34But you have these, you know, kind of much fanfare around around purchases of soybeans and agricultural products and Boeing airplanes. You know, it did almost bring to mind the very old rhetoric about the Chinese market and the potential of business ties, whether from, you know, 1940s, pre-revolution, or from the 1990s. It was kind of striking rhetorical return to eras when we talked about the business potential very differently. Yes, and I think that was front and center. And as you know, he rounded up the heads of a lot of tech, mostly tech companies and some finance companies as well. And I mean, this was sort of his SWAT team.

22:16And of course, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, I think for some reason had said he couldn't come on the trip, but he was summoned urgently at the last moment and flew his private jet to Anchorage and got an Air Force One. because I think Trump wanted to sort of bring as much sort of clout as he could, particularly in the tech world, with him to China. I mean, the Chinese appreciated that. So Trump felt well-armed with some business supporters, or at least not critics. And, you know, he had Elon Musk and, you know, the list. He wasn't just an isolated figure on a summit trip. He was someone with this team.

23:00It wasn't an enormously large team, but it was a very impressive team in terms of the clout that they had. And we're sitting there at the banquet and they had a private session with Li Chang, you know, the prime minister, etc. We'll return to my conversation with Orville Schell after a short break.

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24:51The Chinese focus on Taiwan was in some ways mirrored by the American interest in getting some Chinese help on Iran. I think the hope would be that the Chinese government would put some pressure on Iran to get to a deal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz and all of that. Trump suggested that there was at least some agreement on how the two sides saw the situation or saw the need for the strait to be open. Did you pick up anything about progress on Iran, any meaningful changer? Well, you know, it's very hard to judge. I mean, Trump had an interview with Hannity. You know, they had all these tents set up at the China World Hotel where each network had a tent, and there was Hannity holding court in the tent, but he went over to the Great Hall of the People to do an interview with Trump.

25:41And Trump said two or three times in one little sentence that Xi Jinping has said to him he would do whatever he could to help in the Strait of Hormuz. Well, it's easy to say that, but what does it actually mean? We don't know. But to Trump, That was a very valuable thing to be able to say, that his good friend had promised to help. But, you know, China and Iran have a long relationship, and the foreign minister of Iran was just here. And it's hard to know exactly what those suggestions or suggested promises might mean. I don't know. I think, so far, so good. They laid a good atmospheric sort of platform down where everybody's happy.

26:34And Chinese television after Trump left was just all sort of expressing great, great sort of satisfaction at how friendly it had been and how well it had gone. But it doesn't change the reality of the issues, some of which are very, very difficult to solve and long-lived and have deep, deep historical roots. Unlike most of your colleagues, this is not your first time in China or not one of your first trips. You, I imagine, had conversations with Chinese journalists or Chinese friends who are reacting. Are there interesting differences or reactions you've seen from them that shed light on the kind of Chinese intentions or reactions here?

27:23Well, I think it's fair to say that, you know, sort of ordinary working class people in China, they pretty much stay out of politics. And they're not in a, don't have a hostile attitude, I think, towards Xi Jinping. But professional people, educated people, urban people, that's another story. And I think that there is a lot of dissatisfaction here with the direction that Xi is taking China. And a lot of people are moving abroad. And that's a real index, I think, of the level of disaffection. So even though China seems to be making significant progress in terms of sort of technical development and rejuvenation and many others, possibly even the property market is showing a few signs of being stabilized.

28:22But there is a lot of dissatisfaction. And Xi Jinping knows it. And he's got problems in the military. He's, you know, the Central Military Commission now has one other commissioner besides Xi. He's, you know, all the others are being tried for corruption and this, that, and the other. Who knows what the real reason is that they've been, as the Chinese say, have been capped, have their dunce hat put on their head in effect, and they've lost their jobs and they're undergoing investigation. So there are a lot of things lurking beneath the surface, both internally in China and beneath the surface, as I said before, of the U.S.-China relationship that this summit neither addressed nor I think would have the power to remedy.

29:15And they're bound to keep popping up. So exactly what the long-term effect will be, that's another question. There's been lots of reporting and lots of reason to think this reporting is right to the fact that Xi Jinping is in a period of great confidence and some would call it hubris. He has reason to see China's position and his position in a pretty good light. He'll presumably start a fourth term next year in 2027. Do you think he's overconfident? Do you think he's kind of overreading some of the short-term developments and that the risk right now, both for him and for the relationship, is hubris rather than anything else?

29:56You know, how to describe it, whether it's hubris or just a—I mean, it seems to me we're in a world now where there's a whole group of leaders. I would include Trump, Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-un, and even at least before the recent bombings in Iran, the mullahs have great pretensions of grandiosity to restore their countries to greatness. And in the case of Russia and China, of course, that is a kind of imperial greatness, too, whether they not only flesh out the most expansive borders of what was Russia and what was China, including Tibet, Manchuria, Mongolia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South China Sea, but also to restore it, to sort of soothe their wounded egos that have historically waited for this moment when China would have the wealth and power to throw its weight around and be a big power itself.

31:03and perhaps even earn the right to do a little bullying, as all great powers have. So I think that's a very powerful impulse. And of course, it does raise the question of what's China after? Do they want global hegemony? Could they cooperate with the United States ever again? What are they going to do about the EU and Europe? In other words, what's their version of a new world order? I'm fascinated by this idea that this could be an inflection point that you raised earlier, and notwithstanding all the hard issues that could, you know, kind of drag us back to where the relationship was several months ago.

31:44If it is an inflection point, where do you think we're heading, right? What comes after the inflection? Well, we'd have to start having some real concessions made by both sides. I don't think that's in the cards. I don't think Xi Jinping is ready to make major concessions. I think he views such concessions as hallmarks of weakness. I mean, we'd have to have some kind of a conclusion to the extravagant claims in the South China Sea. And maybe some expression of, I mean, remember what Mao Zedong said about Taiwan when Nixon and Kissinger were there. He said, it's okay if we can't solve this for 100 years.