Sitting in a grand salon of the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square and awaiting the official arrival ceremony of President Trump was to be taken back to that period of Sino-Soviet amity when Stalin was Mao’s “big brother” and the Chinese Communist Party was getting ready to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1959. Known at the U.S. Embassy here (where acronyms are a linguistic way of life) as “the G-HOP”—as if it were an oversized drive-through pancake palace on the miracle mile of a regional American city—the Great Hall is an elephantine example of the kind of late-Stalinist kitsch architecture that spread across China before the Sino-Soviet split wrenched the two fraternal socialist allies asunder.
Under a colorless sky, the welcome ceremony for President Donald Trump was scheduled to unfold in front of the G-HOP. This was the very place where demonstrating students kneeled to petition their government for greater freedom and democracy in 1989 weeks before their demonstrations ended in the June 4 massacre. Then Premier Li Peng had steadfastly refused to come out and accept the students’ petition. This morning, however, China’s current Premier, Li Keqiang, was standing at the bottom of the Hall’s grand red-carpeted stone stairway to welcome Donald and Melania. And, of course, also in waiting was Xi Jinping, using his title of President—rather than his far more potent position, Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party—because it has utility when Chinese supreme leaders are interacting with Western counterparts not completely comfortable consorting with the head of the world’s largest remaining Communist Party.
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Titles aside, Xi’s welcome of Trump was grand, as only the Chinese Communist Party knows how to make a welcoming ceremony, when it wants to. There were acres of red carpeting; two military bands; a goose-stepping honor guard of soldiers, sailors, and airmen (a new affectation to such welcomes); a phalanx of flag- and flower-waving elementary school students (who practiced their “spontaneous” regimen over and over again, led by a stern directrice, before the two leaders arrived); and a 21-gun salute fired off from artillery pieces lined up adjacent to Chairman Mao’s Memorial Mausoleum where the waxy remains of the former revolutionary lie in uninterred repose under a crystal sarcophagus for the viewing pleasure of provincial tourists.
Trump seemed quite satisfied with the grand ceremony as he strode down the red carpet with Xi, whose face was fixed in his signature Mona Lisa-like smile that begs as many questions as it answers about what he is actually thinking and feeling. Trump’s pose, with jaw jutting, made him look like a prize fighter about to enter the ring. Although he and Xi did not seem to take much joy in each other’s company (after all, they could not really communicate, since neither speaks a foreign language), Trump definitely seemed gratified by the pomp and circumstance. After all, it heralded and honored him in the kind of unalloyed way he seldom gets to enjoy back home in America. Not only has he gotten the kind of adoration here in Asia that he craves, but in China he is able to enjoy just the kind of “fake news”-free environment of which he can only dream back in Washington. Here there is no Washington Post, New York Times, or New Yorker magazine to roil the waters. Relieved of insubordinate media attacks, distressing investigations, and raucous demonstrations, he seems to be able to relax, to be more composed, sober, even presidential. Indeed, as I watched him walk through this carefully scripted ceremony with Xi in this very carefully managed environment, Trump seems far better suited to a one-party system where he could do or say whatever he wanted, the media would always manage and put the best face on it, and he would not constantly need to defend himself. In China he was strangely at home.
For this brief interlude touring three Confucian societies (and Vietnam is next), he has found himself in an un-antagonistic, almost gravity-free environment. Being admired rather than derided and extolled rather than demeaned, his whole demeanor seemed to change.
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But putting aside the catalytic effect of being in an adoring, uncritical milieu, and his putative love affair with Xi Jinping, we are still left with myriad issues that divide the U.S. and China. And here, Trump’s final press briefing with Xi and a G-HOP grand salon dripping with gold leaf where questions were not even allowed from journalists, was a deep disappointment. While acknowledging that there were differences between them, but that such disagreements were “natural” (as President Xi put it), both leaders skated merrily over the fissures that actually exist between our two nations’ different perceived national interests, political systems, and values. They skated on a breathtaking surfeit of wishful thinking about a “collective effort” leading to a “win-win” future—in Beijing, people joke that “win-win” means China wins twice. Trump went so far in his flattery as to call Xi “a very special man” with whom he believed he had established “great chemistry,” exactly the sort of pandering “big leaders” most enjoy hearing.
Then he excoriated Obama’s China policy as having caused the problems he views the U.S. as now confronting and even excused Xi of responsibility for the trade deficit. “I don't blame China,” he proclaimed. “After all, who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another country for benefit of their citizens? I give China great credit.”
Not only did he make it sound as if it were the Obama Administration’s fault that we had ended up with such a huge imbalance of payments, but, just as he had explained away his exploitation of the U.S. tax code to avoid paying his own taxes, he excused Xi of having taken advantage of the U.S. Those of us who had come to this G-HOP press briefing expecting some remnant of all the Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro rhetoric about “standing up to China” once expended during the campaign were left scratching our heads at Trump’s contrariness.
By the end of the day, it hardly looked as if Trump’s policy was much different from Obama’s, except Obama never did Xi the honor of a declaration of love. There was hardly any acknowledgement of just how antagonistic some of the issues dividing the U.S. and China actually are, whether on trade, human rights and democracy, the South China Sea, North Korea, or the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands disputed by Japan and Taiwan. In short, the joint briefing marking the conclusion of their talks was a curiously anodyne ending in which Trump seemed to have yielded to Xi’s wiles just to effect the appearance of having established a special bromance. The Trump tiger seemed to have been masterfully tamed by the Xi dragon. Those of us in audience were left to wonder if we had ended up with nothing more than a Mar-a-Lago redux, a slight burnishing on Trump’s vaunted “personal relationship” with Xi garnished by a passel of business deals (allegedly worth $250 billion, although many were only notional MOUs or deals already concluded).
Despite all of President Trumps’ boasts about being a tough negotiator, he seemed to have become so over-infatuated with his courtship, so hungry to ingratiate himself, and so eager to be bathed in acceptance that he had ended up being taken. Most of my fellow foreign correspondents, many veterans of numerous other summits, felt a deep sense of astonishment and anti-climax.
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But there is another possible scenario with a more elongated time frame that is worth considering before we write this whole Beijing odyssey off as a complete misadventure. It is not one that I am predicting, but is one to which I am keeping myself open. It suggests we remain open to the possibility that the White House (not celebrated for its acumen in long-term strategic thinking) actually does have a stratagem that calls for Trump to continue making-nice and bonding with Xi at the top of the power pyramid to create as much “mutual trust” as possible (something members of the Obama Administration never really accomplished because they were more direct), while at the same time allowing other administration officials to begin pushing much harder on specific concrete issue areas on other levels below.
If this is, in fact, their strategy—and there is some suggestion from White House officials on our trip (as I have hinted in previous posts) that it is the case, then we will have to wait a few more weeks to see if the Trump Administration, even as The Donald hugs it out with Xi at the top, allows a more confrontational, even retaliatory, game of hardball to begin on down the line. Because China never gives unless it has no choice, push-back will most certainly be required to restore any real equilibrium to the U.S.-China equation—whether in trade and investment or visas for scholars and journalists. Such a course correction is long overdue. If Trump’s efforts to cultivate Xi give the Chinese leader public face, succeed in creating the semblance of friendship, even manage to confer on U.S.-China relations a blush of the sort of “new kind of big power relationship” for which Xi has long lobbied, that’s fine, as long as Trump allows—perhaps even encourages—putting enough pressure on China at the bottom to level the playing field. Only then will Trump be able to justifiably claim that he has developed a China strategy of his own.{chop}