Xi Jinping meets Trump: who holds the cards?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. What to expect when the odd couple meet in Washington?

0:54When we think about Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, there's a real mismatch between the two men.

1:01President Trump thinks of himself as the consummate dealmaker, right? That is a core part of his political persona. But that is not a core part of Xi Jinping's political persona. And that's not crucial to how he operates. I think it's much better to think of Xi Jinping as operating like a jack-in-the-box. This guy winds up for years, sometimes for decades, and he's just waiting for the right moment to pop. You know when world leaders ring each other up for a chat? It's never just them on the line. Eavesdropping silently on another extension, just out of sight, there is always someone like John Zinn listening in.

1:37Yes, that was a big part of my day job, right, was kind of using the expertise that I had built up over time to help manage and conduct our diplomacy with China. John was the director for China on Joe Biden's National Security Council from 2021 to 2023, having honed his expertise as the CIA's in-house expert on Xi Jinping. I was there in November 2022 when Xi and Biden met in person for the first time at the G20 in Bali.

2:13And then before that, you'll remember we were in the midst of COVID. So the first face-to-face encounter that Biden and Xi had of the Biden presidency was actually a, you know, it was a presidential Zoom, not unlike this one. Good to see you, Mr. President and your colleagues. It's the first time for us to meet virtually. Although it's not as good as a face-to-face meeting, I'm very happy to see my old friend. I think the best approach when you're dealing with a guy like she is to play it cool. You want to look like you're also focused on business and that you're taking this very seriously and you're not going to give anything away for free.

2:53John dealt with a lot during his two years working for the White House. But as Donald Trump prepares to welcome Xi Jinping to Washington today, the stakes are arguably even higher. Trump has started a war he can't seem to stop, and the Chinese are helping his enemy. Stunning new reporting that China may have aided in Iran's attack that killed three US troops earlier this summer. There's the small matter that Xi still has his eye on invading Taiwan. Taiwan is engaged in 10 days of war games, preparing the country for a potential invasion. Oh, and the worry that AI may destroy humanity. This is a danger that's so great.

3:35We've got to do something together with them to reduce, at least reduce, hopefully eliminate the scale of the potential destruction. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. What are Trump and Xi going to talk about in Washington? And what does it mean for the rest of us?

4:01John Zinn, welcome to Today in Focus. Thanks so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. So you're a longtime China analyst. Can you just start by telling me, when did you get so interested in China and the guy who's been running it for the past 13 years? Yeah, I got interested in foreign policy writ large because 9-11 actually happened a week into my freshman year of college. And I had grown up in New Jersey with a view of the Manhattan skyline from my bedroom growing up. So obviously when that happened, that was a huge moment for me. And I ended up realizing very quickly after 9-11 that as a skinny nerdy kid, I was probably not going to end up in the special forces or in the U.S.

4:41Marine Corps. But I saw an advertisement in foreign affairs to be a CIA analyst. I thought that is something I could do. Right. I could be a professional nerd for my government. and I ended up starting at the agency just after Xi Jinping became China's heir apparent. And I realized this was just going to be the most fascinating issue. And I have not been proven wrong. And I think when Biden was president, you were the sort of chief Xi whisperer. Is that right? You were deciphering all of his movements, his pronouncements, his silences and what that actually meant for American diplomacy. And you've even been in the same room during some of these presidential meetings.

5:19So what's he like then? Because he's a mystery to most of us and maybe even to the Chinese people. He doesn't give that much away. What's he like? He does not. I mean, you know, it's interesting because I think there is a tendency to describe him that way. But this guy has been such a big player on the international scene for such a long time. It kind of takes some patience to really get to know him. But I feel like we actually do have a good sense of the guy. And I think what's striking about seeing him in person in particular was that, you know, It kind of reinforced, you know, rather than upset my prior conceptions of him.

5:53When I saw him in person, it was right after the party congress where he had really secured his dominance over China's leadership. This was a guy who was large and in charge and very much in his prime as an authoritarian leader in that moment. Right. And I think he was feeling that sense of confidence. And so his whole cadence, and I think this is true across the interactions I've seen from him, it's very much almost how he appears on Chinese television. He speaks in this kind of slow, methodical, mellifluous baritone.

6:28I think he speaks with that very deliberate cadence, because especially at this point in his tenure, he knows that everybody, including senior U.S. officials, are going to be hanging on his word and interpreting it and listening very closely to what it is he has to say.

6:47I mean, the man you describe, calm, methodical, careful, it sounds like the exact opposite of Donald Trump, who, of course, he is meeting. How have these two different characters, two most powerful men in the world, handled each other in the past? Because they've already met once this year, haven't they, back in May when Trump went for a state visit to China? I mean, one could not conjure an odder couple than these two men, right? Yeah. I would say the mismatch between the two of them, it's really evolved over time. And I would say very much in Trump's first term, she did not know what to do with this guy.

7:24Because in Xi's own political system, in China's political system, the kind of freewheeling, charismatic style that is essential to Trump and his political brand is not only alien, it is crushed in that political system. And so when you think about Xi Jinping, you know, the Trump administration likes to use this poker metaphor for describing the relationship. Xi is very much the kind of poker player who places cards close. He's looking both at the cards he actually has and reading the other players very subtly and very cautiously and not giving much away. And Trump is just the opposite, right?

7:59He's like the guy at a casino who's on a hot streak. And I think that was very much true in his first term. Nobody was more surprised, it seems like, about Trump's victory than Trump himself. And so he just didn't know how to handle this. Because we can't continue to allow China to rape our country, and that's what they're doing. It's the greatest theft in the history of the world. And I think basically what happened, especially with the first trade war, was that Trump's unpredictability actually did give the U.S. a lot of leverage. Yeah, President Donald Trump just announced that he's imposing 10 % tariffs on$200 billion worth of Chinese goods.

8:35And you can see the Chinese side and Xi in particular groping around for some kind of adequate response, some kind of way to deal with Trump. But, you know, I think the story of their relationship is that she has had 10 years to figure this out. And I think in Trump's second term, we saw the fruition of China basically after getting punched in the face, going to the gym and getting really pumped up, right, and preparing for the next for the next flood fest with the export controls they imposed on the United States and the retaliatory measures that they just seem to have ready to go off the shelf.

9:10China is striking back. In just the last hour, Beijing announced it is now slapping new retaliatory tariffs on all U.S. goods by an additional 50 percent. So it's been a struggle for Xi, but he is very much a, you know, he's a diligent student. The CCP is a learning organization, and so they learned from those initial encounters how to do this. And is it beneath him to kind of kiss the ring, as they say? You know, I think about the last prime minister of the UK, Keir Starmer, when he finds himself in the Oval Office, he's falling over himself, fawning over Trump. And with a flourish, he takes out of his jacket pocket a personal invitation from the king, a second state visit, knowing that Trump just loves to be flattered.

9:59Will she play that kind of game with him? No, I mean, I think if anything, you know, this is this is going to be potentially kind of the opposite. And you're already seeing that in what's what's been reported in the press just about the the protocol and how this is playing out. You know, Trump is going to make a grand gesture of meeting Xi himself when he lands at Andrews Air Force Base. Right. And she didn't go visit Trump personally on the tarmac. And if we look back to the summit in May where Trump is very flowery and over the top. Nice place. Nice place. I like it. I like it. He shows up with a gaggle of CEOs.

10:37He's carrying on about how wonderful Xi Jinping is and how much respect he has for him and what a strong leader he is. You're a great leader. I say it to everybody. You're a great leader. Sometimes people don't like me saying it, but I say it anyway because it's true. I only say the truth. And she just kind of looks at him. What, just like, yeah, whatever. Yeah, it's unrequited. But, you know, she's going in perspective, and this is part of how his ideology informs his thinking, is that he sees the United States as a declining but dangerous power. Right. And the most authoritative statement that we've got from Xi was actually smack in the middle of the Biden administration where he said, yes, you know, the East is rising and the West is declining.

11:20She is going to walk into this meeting knowing that in a matter of weeks, President Trump is at best going to be a lame duck president. and at worst he's going to be politically maimed at home and deal with the challenge of divided government. She, by contrast, is going to walk straight from this meeting just weeks later, sometime in October, into a major Communist Party meeting that is going to lay the groundwork for his fourth five-year term in office.

11:58And let's talk about what's going to be on the agenda at this summit. Taiwan will undoubtedly be raised in some capacity. And wasn't even the Taiwan issue that threatened to collapse this summit? Was Xi threatening not to turn up at all? Yeah. So to rewind the movie a little bit, right after the two leaders had their first in-person encounter of Trump's second turn in South Korea last November, a few weeks later, that December, the U.S. announced a$10 billion arms sale to Taiwan. And as the Trump administration liked to point out, it was more than all the combined arms sales that were announced during the Biden administration, which is part of, I suspect, probably part of the appeal to Trump, right?

12:40That this is going to be some prolific. Yeah, he likes being the biggest. He likes being the biggest and the baddest, right? So then in the aftermath of that, there was reporting that leaked out, unfortunately, that there was another arms sale package on Trump's desk for$14 billion. And the Chinese did not like what happened with the$10 billion arms sale. They think it's embarrassing to Xi Jinping to have such a big arms sale announced right after the two leaders met. And so there was a lot of hemming and hawing on the US side, and I think pressure from the Chinese side not to go forward with it ahead of the summit.

13:11Yeah. And so did that second$14 billion sale not go through then in anticipation of this summit? It has not gone through yet. It's just been sitting on Trump's desk. And maybe I've misread the situation when it comes to Trump, but I kind of got the impression that he wasn't that bothered about protecting Taiwan's independence, certainly some of his predecessors. And he kind of seems to treat the island with a certain degree of suspicion. um and so is that right is that how trump views it and and how come he also if he also wants to arm them is that just about lining america's pockets rather than allowing the taiwanese people to stand up against the might of china that is very much my instinct right that that's how they were able to get the the arms sale through right that it was the biggest ever and that this was going to be good for u.s defense industry which trump has been focused on but i think you're right.

14:03I think, you know, there is real suspicion on Trump's part about Taiwan. We've heard him talk about, you know, Taiwan's semiconductor industry, which has been so crucial to the AI boom. What, because all of the American companies like, what, Anthropic, OpenAI, they all rely on those chips? Exactly, exactly. The vast preponderance of those high-end chips that are powering AI technologically are actually manufactured in Taiwan. And Trump has said, well, they stole our jobs, right? They stole like our high-end manufacturing jobs. So that's number one. But I think you could see it even in the comments coming out of the last summit, where Trump was making comments about, you know, Taiwan's really far away.

14:40And, you know, it'd be really hard to get there. And do we really want to get embroiled in this kind of fight? And just kind of, you know, I think spoke with his inside voice, really, which was quite damaging. His inside voice is usually outside. I mean. Yes, it does tend to come out and go for a walk pretty frequently. I think the last thing we need right now is a war that's 9 ,500 miles away. I think that's the last thing we need. We're doing very well. With the U.S. defending Taiwan. You know, I was actually just in Taiwan this past summer and met with Taiwan's president and a number of senior and political officials.

15:17And what's striking to me is that Taiwan, I would say, over the past decade, has really refashioned itself to become a model Trump administration partner. They have reoriented their economy away from China as it used to be a decade and a half ago that they were sending more than 80 % of their foreign direct investment to China. That's now less than 10%. They are riding the coattails of America's AI boom and it's producing double-digit growth. They have a trade deal with the Trump administration. Unlike most U.S. partners, they're actually really happy about the trade deal. And at the same time, they are making serious investments in their own self-defense, right?

15:58Which the Trump administration has been very focused on. Allies and partners picking up the slack and paying more for their own defense. So I think what's really striking coming out of that trip to Taiwan is that big structural pieces that are usually much harder to do, the economic piece, the military piece, those are in place. The short pole and the tent is the things we say, the diplomacy. And since we've been talking about AI chips, let's talk about AI safety, which is undoubtedly going to loom fairly large over this summit. And domestically, Trump has been facing calls from people like Sam Altman at OpenAI, even Elon Musk saying, hey, we need to slow down.

16:32He, of course, has dismissed the whole thing as a hoax. He said there's a sick conspiracy going on against AI data centres. And the only one that's happy about it is China. Whoever wins, AI wins. Do you think there's any likelihood we could see any sort of agreement between the two over AI safety? I would be shocked, frankly. Really? And I would be, yes, I think we should have very low expectations on this. And I think for a couple of different reasons. I think one, President Trump is not really interested in regulation or some kind of slowdown. And I think on the Chinese side, I don't think there's real interest in a slowdown of AI, right?

17:10They have their own safety concerns, but I think a lot of them are an outgrowth of the concerns that they've had about how to regulate the internet writ large since the start of the digital era, right, where it's really more about regime security and censorship. Yeah, how they can control the message, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I think some of that is because they, you know, they are, they're nipping at the U.S. heels, but they are behind. So I don't think they haven't gone through the same kind of freak out moment that, you know, Twitter and civil society in the United States have gone through so far about this loss of control.

17:43So there's not the same kind – there's concern, but the level – the fever pitch of anxiety on the Chinese side doesn't seem to be there. But I think even if there were real concern about it, right, on the Chinese side, there is such deeply ingrained suspicion of the United States that I think we would be the last people that they would want to talk to about this issue, right? And not the first, right? And think about it. You know, they've said this, you know, the one thing that where there is a common denominator and Dario Modi has to say about AI or in what President Trump says about AI is that China has to remain behind the United States.

18:19We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world. And frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins, AI wins. And we can put guardrails, we can do this and that. So China sees any talk and any discussion of kind of pacing the frontier or slowdown as a trap. And it's not just this issue, right? I think there's a broader context here to remember. Every U.S. administration throughout this century, Democrat or Republican, has tried to have a serious conversation with the Chinese side about crisis communications, right? There was this major incident at the start of the century before 9-11, the EP3 incident.

18:57A Chinese fighter jet crashed with a U.S. surveillance plane. This is an unusual situation in which an American military aircraft had to make an emergency landing on Chinese soil. And people realized, oh my gosh, we don't have a great way to talk to each other in a crisis. We've made very limited progress on that, and there's real suspicion from the Chinese side. This is not like a Cold War where there's a functioning hotline that can be used in a crisis. But wait a minute. Sorry, can Trump and Xi not text each other? I mean, does the U.S. president not have literally a direct line? We have a direct line, right?

19:31They can get on a phone call. You know, that requires a fair bit of wedding planning to do, but it's possible, right? Technically, it's there to actually get the two leaders on the phone. It's not always a speedy process, right? Because the Chinese are methodical. I think the real question, the real challenge is not whether or not you call, it's whether anybody picks up on the other end. What, you literally, they just send you to voicemail? What a power move. Oh, my goodness. That is, well, exactly, exactly. And I think that's what freaked out a lot of senior U.S. policymakers during that EP3 crisis at the start of the century was that they were trying to reach their Chinese counterparts and they weren't getting an answer.

20:08And my suspicion, and I don't have direct evidence for this, is that whereas the U.S. learned from that we need some kind of meaningful crisis communications mechanism, like what we had in the Cold War with the Soviets, the Chinese learned the opposite. This is a power move. It gives us more leverage. The U.S. ultimately ended up issuing kind of a de facto apology in that moment and that this works. And, you know, more recently, you know, over the last 10 years or so, there's been a big push to talk about nuclear weapons and arms control related issues. China is going through one of the most dramatic buildouts of a nuclear arsenal, certainly since the end of the Cold War.

20:44Oh, God. And, you know, they have zero interest in having that conversation with us. and I just wonder if you followed the story that ran on CNN over the weekends this pretty shocking investigation that suggested an analyst in the U.S. military produced a report towards the start of the U.S. war with Iran which identified this Chinese cargo ship in the Middle East that was they thought transporting components of a nuclear weapons program and the U.S. military apparently was preparing to board that ship when they realized that this intelligence report had been hallucinated by AI and was completely false.

21:20Do you think that that will have reached Xi's ears? Is that something that they're going to, it's going to kind of focus minds at the summit? It may have reached his ears. I mean, they may be learning about this, you know, from the news reports as well. But, you know, what would get China's attention, I think, is less the intelligence snafu per se than the willingness, you know, the possibility that they would board a Chinese flag. Yeah, this is how wars start. Yes, yes. So this, to their mind, is either a symptom of the U.S. doing something like this intentionally or just being reckless.

21:59Coming up, why a really good meeting between these two might be bad news for the rest of us.

22:43We'll see you next time. your biggest sales days and capture every bit of potential revenue. Go to ShipStation.com and use code audio and get 30 days free.

22:54John, let's talk about Iran. China is easily Tehran's biggest trading partner, which is something that Trump is understandably not very happy about. Before the war started in February, China was buying something like 80 % of all of Iran's oil, and that has dropped fairly dramatically since, but still, there is definitely some sort of mutually beneficial relationship between China and Iran. Do you think that Trump is going to make any attempt to break that up? I think he will certainly bring it up, especially because this is clearly his foremost foreign policy concern right now. But I think what was really interesting at the May summit, President Trump said this quite explicitly, so we talked about it, but I don't need China's help.