Assessing the Summit

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Good evening. There were no knock-out blows when Trump 2.0 met Xi 3.0 in Beijing this month for the two presidents’ highly anticipated summit. But did one of them win on points? This week’s cover story asks seven Chinese and U.S. experts and former government officials — and one relative of a Chinese prisoner of conscience — to assess the meeting and its outcomes. When it came to the ever central issue of Taiwan, Chinese officials were hoping for a repeat of Donald Trump’s 2018 “surrender summit” with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, when he said he believed Putin’s assurances that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and not the American intelligence community’s evidence to the contrary. In the end Beijing did not get what it was wishing for. Trump did not say or do anything that fundamentally changed America’s long-standing policy towards Taiwan, although a big test of that fortitude will come later this year when he decides whether or not to proceed with a $14 billion arms sale to the island. For now, at least, Xi Jinping can be happy that Trump’s broader approach towards the world’s most important bilateral relationship seems to have shifted from serial confrontation to a preference for constructive stability.And in this week’s podcast, Savannah Billman and Rachel Cheung discuss Rachel’s recent reporting on the quiet companies profiting from China’s AI surge.Other items in this week’s issue: The companies invited to Xi and Trump’s summit supper, Victor Shih on Trump vs Xi II, and Alicia García-Herrero and Elina Ribakova on Russia and China, unequal…