China’s G2 Dilemma

Treść źródłowa

Ahead of our fuller assessment of Chinese reactions to this week’s summit, we turn to a related debate already underway: Chinese engagement with Trump’s revival of the G2 concept. The analysis below draws on a review of around fifty articles (full bibliography here) touching on the idea, from which we have selected six representative articles. Many thanks to Cherry Yu for her help with the review. — JacobWhen Trump framed his October 2025 meeting with Xi Jinping as a meeting of the “G2”, he did more than revive an old phrase. He reactivated a debate that has existed in Chinese policy circles for nearly two decades: how should China respond when Washington recognises it as a peer, but does so through a framework Beijing sees as hegemonic, exclusionary and politically costly?Beijing has now rejected the G2 framing twice: first in 2009, when the concept was floated under Obama, and again following Trump’s revival of the term. After the Busan summit on 31 October, an MFA spokesperson brushed off the framing by restating China’s commitment to independent foreign policy, multipolarity and the Global South. Wang Yi made the rejection more explicit in March 2026, when he said China does not “subscribe to the logic of great-power co-governance”.That remains the official line. In the first of the pieces presented below, former official Zhou Li (周力) gives it its sharpest articulation, warning Chinese analysts against taking the concept seriously. For Zhou, G2 is not a neutral description of US-China weight in the international system. It is a world-order frame: one that legitimises gr…