What to expect when you are expecting a summit

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The Chinese media story of Xi-Trump diplomacy is a story of diminishing expectations. In 2017, official media could still present personal diplomacy as opening a new phase of pragmatic cooperation and great power diplomacy (a term entertained but ultimately rejected by the Obama administration). By 2018-2019, the same leader diplomacy was recast as a tool for preventing Trump’s first trade war from overwhelming the relationship. By 2020, at the time that Trump tried to shift blame on COVID mismanagement to China, the surrounding discourse had hardened into strategic suspicion. In the current renewed Trump-era context, Chinese media expectations are deliberately modest: stabilize the relationship, prevent escalation, bargain where useful, and defend red lines. The dominant Chinese framing is no longer “reset,” but “managed coexistence under pressure.”In the run-up to the expected Xi-Trump meetings in Beijing, there is a lot of speculation , but little preparation on the topics to be on the agenda. There will be a last-minute effort by Vice Premier He Lifang and Treasury Secretary Steve Bessent in Seoul in the coming days, so perhaps we will know more on Thursday when high level talks start. Meanwhile, I did a review of the Chinese media around this summit and the previous one (together with my new best friend Chat). I thought the final product was interesting enough to share with you. Thanks for reading Bert’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.In my view, the Chinese side is pretty comfortable where they are: the courts have been contain…