Trump and Xi play up stability without resolving major tensions

President Donald Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, emphasized stability today as they concluded a high-stakes summit in Beijing, though without announcing any clear resolutions on trade, Taiwan, the war in Iran or other major points of contention.

Sitting beside Xi during a meeting at Zhongnanhai, the walled headquarters for China’s ruling Communist Party, Trump said the Chinese leader had “become really a friend” and that they felt similarly about the war.

“We’ve settled a lot of different problems that other people wouldn’t have been able to settle,” Trump said, without elaborating.

Xi said he had chosen to receive Trump at Zhongnanhai to reciprocate for his 2017 visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. In the comments he made publicly, he avoided wading into specific issues, in contrast to a blunt warning over Taiwan he issued on Thursday.

Xi described the visit as a “historic and symbolic” milestone. “We have established a new bilateral relationship, based on constructive strategic stability,” he said.

A few hours after the Zhongnanhai meeting, Trump boarded Air Force One for a flight back to the United States.

The Trump-Xi summit, the first U.S. presidential visit to China in nearly a decade, was a test of whether the detente between the two nations would continue. It was heavy on public praise and pleasantries. At a lavish state banquet Thursday evening, Trump invited Xi to visit the White House in September.

The White House described a Trump-Xi meeting Thursday as a “good meeting” and sought to underscore Trump’s priorities, saying that both sides agreed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open and that “Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.” Trump also told a reporter today that he and Xi had made “fantastic trade deals.”

But tensions were never far from the surface.

In formal talks behind closed doors on Thursday, Xi told Trump that the issue of Taiwan, a self-governing island that China claims as its territory, could lead to conflict and “an extremely dangerous situation” if it were handled poorly, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency.

Xi also made a reference to avoiding the “Thucydides Trap” — a concept that suggests that an established power tends to be threatened by a rising one, leading to a clash.

Trump and Xi last met in October in South Korea, where they agreed to pause a trade war. Before that, China had threatened sweeping new export restrictions on rare earths as retaliation for heavy U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods. Xi agreed in South Korea to postpone those measures for a year. This week’s visit ended without any visible progress on the export restrictions, and it remained unclear today whether China would agree to an extension.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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