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Oh, what a lovely trade war. The United States and China got to test their heavy tariff and embargo artillery without inflicting significant damage on each other. And then, at their summit meeting in South Korea on Thursday, both countries’ leaders took a step back from the brink of the economic “decoupling” that many analysts have forecast for nearly a decade.
“Both sides saw what real decoupling would mean. They looked over the precipice and decided, ‘I don’t think so,’” explains Christopher Johnson, the CIA’s former top China analyst who now runs China Strategies Group, a consulting firm. This “temporary patch-up” will give each government breathing room, he told me in an interview.
Donald Trump’s critics will argue that this was a Chinese “TACO” — “Trump always chickens out” — as the president agreed to halt the imposition of 100 percent tariffs on Beijing that even he had admitted were “not sustainable” and set a lower rate. Trump backed away after China agreed to a yearlong pause in its potentially crippling embargo on rare-earth minerals on which it holds a near monopoly. China showed it could deny Trump “escalation dominance” with its export controls, Johnson contends.
But to me the summit looks more like a win-win, as the Chinese tediously like to say, than a defeat for Trump. The two sides flexed their muscles, scared the financial markets just enough to be credible and then found a temporary compromise that opens the way for what Johnson predicts will be a year of summitry with reciprocal visits to China and America.
As the French saying goes: “Seule le provisoire dure.” Only the temporary lasts. That appears to apply to the world’s two leading superpowers, which are better served by preservation of the status quo than some “grand bargain” that could be dangerous for both.
Trump described the meeting with his characteristic hyperbole. “I would say on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best, I would say the meeting was a 12,” he told reporters on Air Force One as he left South Korea. What strikes me watching Trump and Xi maneuver in this moment is that they share a taste for autocratic, one-man rule, but bring to it radically different personalities, values and experiences.
The two share an obsession with their place in history and are fanatical self-promoters. Like Trump, Xi is a nonstop propagandist. The five volumes of his collected speeches and writings are known as “Xi Jinping Thought.”
“Xi clearly sees himself as a man of destiny, the latest caretaker of Chinese civilization whose mission is to guide his country on the path to national rejuvenation,” argues Joseph Torigian, a professor at American University and author of “The Party’s Interests Come First,” a brilliant biography of Xi’s father. Trump similarly sees himself as an instrument of national renewal who will, as millions of his red-hatted followers proclaim, “Make America Great Again.”
Yet, the differences between them are stark: one president seems to revel in corruption, the other views it as a poison that could destroy his party’s control; one took a gilded path to power as the son of a real estate tycoon; the other suffered terribly during the purge years of the 1970s; one plays a short game with wildly oscillating policies; the other a long game built on meticulous plans and clearly articulated goals.
Where Trump is a disrupter who uses his erratic and impulsive decisions as bargaining weapons, Xi is a disciplined and ruthless enforcer. But Lingling Wei, a top China reporter for the Wall Street Journal, argued recently that Xi has learned from his interactions with the bombastic Trump and adopted a code that amounts to, as the headline on her story put it, “punch hard, concede little.”
The most unlikely fact shared by the two men is that they are at war with the governing class beneath them. Trump’s strange position as a populist billionaire fighting a war against what he views as the “deep state” elite is well known. Less so is Xi’s campaign to purge what he saw as the corruption and weakness that enfeebled the party, military and intelligence elites.
Xi pledged in 2012 as he rose to power that he would fight “tigers and flies at the same time, resolutely investigating law-breaking cases of leading officials.” A former U.S. intelligence official told me that in an early meeting with fellow party leaders, Xi placed a blue folder in front of each of them documenting their relatives’ corruption. Since 2012, Xi’s party inspectors have disciplined more than 6.2 million people, according to the Wall Street Journal. The number of people investigated for infractions has risen from around 180,000 in 2013 to 889,000 last year.
The purge has been especially fierce in the Chinese military. Xi realized that senior officers in the People’s Liberation Army were getting their posts by bribing superiors, and then extracting similar payments from their underlings. In 2023, Xi removed two top commanders on the PLA Rocket Force; the next year, he purged two former defense ministers. This month, just before a big party plenum meeting, he sacked nine more top commanders, including the general who headed the Eastern Theater Command, which oversees Taiwan operations.
A symbol of Xi’s war against military corruption is his choice of Gen. Zhang Shengmin, the military’s top anti-graft inspector, as vice chairman of the Central Commission, which is headed by Xi himself. He said back in 2014, when he began to purge the military, that when he read reports of PLA corruption, “I feel deep disgust and often can’t help but slam the table. … If the army is corrupt, it can’t fight.”
What’s ahead now? Johnson says Trump seems to be aiming for a relationship with Xi that mirrors the one that President Ronald Reagan had with Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev. To get there, he had to de-escalate. His instructions to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent were, “‘Let’s make a deal,’” Johnson says.
Trump seems to view major-power foreign policy as a tough-guys club, and he obviously regards Xi as a fellow member. But Trump may underestimate just how ruthless and disciplined Xi is. Certainly, he proved a much tougher adversary in the now-paused trade war than Trump imagined.
The idea of a world governed by these two autocrats is loathsome. But if that’s what we’re stuck with for now, it’s certainly better to have them talking than fighting.
David Ignatius is a columnist for the Washington Post.