Two Summits in Beijing and the Multipolar Transition

U.S. President Donald Trump’s May 13-15 state visit to China produced a raft of headlines unthinkable a decade ago. “This time, Trump and Xi meet as equals”, declared British newspaper The Times.

A delegation of CEOs—Nvidia’s Jensen Huang (who joined at the last minute), Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook and more—accompanied the president to Beijing, signaling that the American decoupling project has, at least for the moment, run its course. Trump publicly defended the right of half a million Chinese students to attend U.S. universities. He called Chinese President Xi Jinping a “great leader” and said “the relationship is a very strong one.” The Times columnist Gerard Baker, who has spent years cheerleading for the China hawks, conceded that “the unipolar moment was fleeting” and that “there are two true superpowers.”

Toward a thaw?

This is a remarkable shift. Trump has cast himself as a China hawk since at least his 2016 presidential campaign. He pledged to label China a currency manipulator on day one, accused Beijing of “stealing our jobs” and made tariffs on Chinese goods a centerpiece of his platform. Once in office, he initiated a trade war, banned Chinese tech titan Huawei from U.S. 5G networks, expelled Chinese journalists, signed bipartisan legislation funneling weapons to China’s Taiwan region and oversaw the 2017 National Security Strategy that designated China as a “strategic competitor.”

Far from breaking with this approach, the Joe Biden administration deepened it. Trump’s tariffs were retained; the CHIPS and Science Act and the October 2022 export controls escalated the campaign to curb China’s technological progress into a full-spectrum technology war; AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, the Quad, a diplomatic partnership between Australia, the U.S., India and Japan, and an expanding network of bases deepened the longstanding architecture of military encirclement.

Trump’s second term began with the same logic dialed up. “Liberation Day” tariffs pushed effective rates on Chinese goods to over 145 percent. Weapons sales to Taiwan hit a billion U.S. dollars in a week. Both Trump presidencies, in other words, were meant to represent the same thing: an escalation of the longstanding U.S. campaign of containment, encirclement and disruption against China.

Hostile actions backfired

What’s changed is not the strategy but its results.

Biden’s semiconductor war was meant to choke off China’s technological advance. Instead, it accelerated China’s push for self-sufficiency. Tech startup DeepSeek and others have shown that Chinese AI is competitive with anything Silicon Valley has to offer, and at a fraction of the cost. Chinese automaker BYD outsold Tesla globally in battery-electric vehicles last year by over 600,000 units. China now accounts for roughly 30 percent of world manufacturing output, more than the next nine largest manufacturing countries combined, and installed 54 percent of all new industrial robots in 2024.

Trump’s tariff war backfired even more spectacularly. When tariffs reached 145 percent, Beijing tightened export controls on rare earths, of which it processes over 90 percent of world supply. Within days the U.S. was at the negotiating table. Vice President JD Vance had been crowing that “the United States has far more cards than the People’s Republic of China;” in the event, as political columnist David Finkelstein observed in the Financial Times that Trump landed in Beijing on May 13 facing a “great wall of confidence,” an assessment in Beijing that China has both “the will and the leverage to successfully push back.”

Also, when it comes to the U.S. and its international relations, and particularly the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, China increasingly seems, to the rest of the world, to be the grownup in the room. As Finkelstein wrote, “Recent U.S. military actions in the Caribbean, Venezuela and especially Iran help Beijing make the case that America is a force for global instability.”

It is in this context that Trump’s comments on Iran during the Beijing summit need to be read. Trump claimed that he and Xi “feel very similar”—that the Strait of Hormuz should be open, and that Iran should not have nuclear weapons. However, these are actually longstanding Chinese positions, even if Trump’s phrasing predictably leaves something to be desired in terms of phrasing, nuance and completeness; indeed, they are longstanding Iranian positions. Tehran has consistently maintained that it has no nuclear weapons program, and a Hormuz blockade has only ever been a defensive, not to say partial, measure.

The core of China’s position, which Trump didn’t mention, is that the conflict “should not have happened in the first place,” that “the use of force is a dead end” and that what’s needed is a “comprehensive and lasting ceasefire” and a “sustainable security architecture for the region.” The Chinese Foreign Ministry has been explicit about the matter: The war was illegal and must end.

An internal issue for China

Tellingly, the two sides issued sharply different readouts. The American side stressed cooperation in the Gulf. President Xi at the Beijing summit made clear that Taiwan is “the most important issue in China-U.S. relations,” that ‘Taiwan independence” and cross-Straits peace are “as irreconcilable as fire and water” and that mishandling the question would lead to “clashes and even conflicts.”

This is the heart of the matter. Taiwan is an integral part of China. Its separation from the mainland in 1949, the year the People’s Republic of China was established, was the work of American imperialism and the one-China principle is recognized in international law by the United Nations and by 181 countries, including the U.S. The U.S. arms sales that have turned the island into, in the words of China’s State Council Taiwan Affairs Office, “an ATM for American arms dealers” are designed to pull China into an arms race and lay the groundwork for a future war. The Chinese government could not accept this. National reunification is non-negotiable.

The deeper meaning of the recent summit was that the U.S. ruling class is having to, very reluctantly, start to come to terms with the world as it actually is. It does not “hold the cards.” As Xi has repeatedly emphasized, “The world is big enough to accommodate both countries, and one country’s success is an opportunity for the other.” The Chinese have been consistently saying this for years. The difference now is that a growing number of U.S. political analysts are admitting that they’re right: Win-win cooperation between major powers is possible; what isn’t possible is the indefinite extension of unipolar U.S. hegemony.

Putin in Beijing

A mere four days after Trump departed Beijing, Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived for a two-day state visit. This was the first time in modern diplomatic history that the heads of state of the U.S. and China, and of Russia and China, have met bilaterally within such a compressed timeframe.

Where the China-U.S. summit focused on building a “constructive relationship of strategic stability” that was, in substance, largely an acknowledgment of new realities, the China-Russia summit produced a thick agenda of concrete deliverables. Xi and Putin signed a joint statement on further strengthening comprehensive strategic coordination and deepening good-neighborliness and friendly cooperation; agreed to extend the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation for a further five years; advanced the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline (50 billion cubic meters of gas a year); and concluded more than 20 other agreements on trade, technology, energy and education.

China-Russia bilateral trade reached $228 billion in 2025; China has now been Russia’s largest trading partner for 16 consecutive years.

The joint statement also condemned “treacherous military strikes against other countries,” “the assassination of leaders of sovereign states” and “the brazen kidnapping of national leaders for trial,” an unmistakable reference to recent American conduct in Iran and Venezuela.

The two summits, taken together, illuminate the historical process now underway. China’s relationship with the U.S. is essentially about managing the “drag factor” of a hegemon attempting to preserve its position by any means available—wars, tariffs, sanctions, technology warfare, military encirclement, bullying and threats.

China’s relationship with Russia, by contrast, is about constructing a positive alternative: a multipolar order based on sovereign equality, the UN Charter, the principle of non-interference and the legitimate development interests of the Global South. Putin’s framing was that the Russia-China partnership advances “without allying against anyone;” Xi’s was that the two countries should work to make “the global governance system more just and reasonable.”

Both Trump’s and Putin’s visits highlight China’s rising profile on the world stage, its status as a highly responsible major country and its determination to pursue a foreign policy of peace, development and cooperation.

The author is an activist, writer and independent political commentator based in London, the United Kingdom. He is the author of The End of the Beginning: Lessons of the Soviet Collapse (2019) and The East Is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century (2023).