Beijing Did Not Simply “Write the Script”

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The German Marshall Fund of the United States has just published a thoughtful and pointed commentary titled “Beijing Wrote the Script,” arguing that China “slipped a loaded phrase” into the White House statement on the Trump-Xi summit.The phrase in question is one of the summit’s most eye-catching diplomatic outcomes: that the United States and China should build what the White House called “a constructive relationship of strategic stability on the basis of fairness and reciprocity.”The GMF piece is right to take diplomatic language seriously, but perhaps went too far in implying that the Trump White House may not have understood what it was accepting:“It is unclear how exactly the phrase ended up in the White House readout, but it must be assumed that China pushed the United States to include it. What did the Trump White House think it was agreeing to? Most likely, it saw the request to use the phrase as just diplomatic boilerplate to accompany a trade package and maintain a cooperative tone.”The limitation of this framing is that it risks turning what appears to have been a negotiated diplomatic formula into a story of American inattentiveness and Chinese manipulation. It gives the reader the impression that Beijing carefully loaded a phrase with political meaning, while U.S. officials sleepwalked into repeating it.But the public record suggests something more complicated.First, the GMF article makes a factual mistake near the beginning. It says: “Not coincidentally, the same wording appeared in the White House’s statement.” But the same wording did not appear.The Chinese…