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US President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping end unipolar age in Beijing

By Bang Xiao, 16 May 26, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-16/us-donald-trump-china-xi-jinping-end-unipolar-age-beijing/106687004

For nearly a decade, the world has braced for a collision.

The dominant United States and a rising China, locked in escalating strategic competition, were said to be hurtling towards a Thucydides Trap that history suggested would be almost impossible to avoid.

This week in Beijing, both Donald Trump and Xi Jinping quietly admitted something the rest of the world has been slow to grasp. Neither of them can afford the collision.

The summit produced no breakthrough trade deal, no joint statement, no big announcement on Taiwan. And yet what it delivered may turn out to be more consequential than any of those things. The public outline of a new global order.

One in which the US and China are not enemies, not rivals, and not partners in the warm Western sense. They are something newer and harder to name. Two structurally interdependent superpowers who have decided, for now, to manage their rivalry rather than let it manage them.

At the state banquet on Thursday night, Xi put the new compact in language no Chinese leader has previously offered an American counterpart in such direct terms.

“The China-US relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world,” he said.

“We must make it work and never mess it up.”

Beijing gave the framework a name: a “constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability”. 

Xi spelled it out in four phrases. Positive stability with cooperation as the mainstay. Sound stability with moderate competition. Constant stability with manageable differences. Enduring stability with promises of peace.

Trump endorsed it. Beijing says the framework will guide bilateral relations for the next three years and beyond.

Read carefully, that is not a thaw. It is the architecture of a new bipolar order.

What was striking about Beijing this week was not just the warmth of the welcome that Xi has staged, it was the unprecedented openness. Cameras were granted access to Zhongnanhai, China’s most secretive political compound, in numbers nearly no foreign press has ever enjoyed.

Xi gave Trump a tour of trees four centuries old, told him the seeds of Chinese roses were on their way home as a gift, and walked beside him into rooms that almost no foreign leader has ever entered.

The only other one to have stood there, it should be said, is Vladimir Putin.

Xi framed the access in personal terms. He told Trump in front of the cameras that he had “chosen this place especially to reciprocate the hospitality extended to me in 2017 at Mar-a-Lago”. It was a private courtesy returned.

Trump went further. He called the relationship “the G2” — the world’s two most important countries.

At the banquet he called Xi “my friend” and described the visit as one of “the most consequential relationships in world history”. He traced the connection between the two peoples back 250 years.

“It’s a special world,” he said, “with the two of us united and together.”

That is the speech of a US president acknowledging a shared story. Nothing in it reads like he will contain a rival.

At the Zhongnanhai tea on Friday, Trump matched Xi’s warmth. He said the two had known each other “almost 12 years” and had “settled problems other people wouldn’t have been able to settle”.

The first test is already in front of them. It is the Strait of Hormuz.

Both leaders publicly agreed this week that the strait should be reopened. Xi indicated he would press Tehran behind the scenes.

What is on the calendar is September 24. That is when Xi will arrive in Washington for the reciprocal state visit Trump confirmed before his departure from China.

It is also, effectively, the deadline for the two most powerful men in the world.

If the Middle East war is not resolved by then, Xi will land in Washington without the commitment he made this week. The G2 will face its first practical test having failed it.

Both sides bet on a wider grey

There was no joint statement issued from Beijing this week. But what Trump delivered at Zhongnanhai, with Xi standing beside him, read like one.

For more than a decade, the US-China relationship has been described in black and white. Rivals or partners. Containment or appeasement. Decoupling or engagement. Democracy or authoritarianism.

This week, both leaders quietly retired the narrative. What they care about most sits in the grey area in between: trade, energy, Iran, supply chains, agriculture and Chinese international students.

The bet is that the grey will keep expanding. If it does, the Cold War tactics of the past decade will lose their grip. Less chip-export brinkmanship. Fewer tariff retaliations. Quieter security frictions. None of it is guaranteed.

The grey holds only if both sides keep their nerve.

The bet rests on a structural reality. Both superpowers are slowing.

China’s growth has decelerated from the highs of the 2000s, weighed down by demographics, a property correction and US tech restrictions.

America’s productivity is real, but its consumer is exhausted, its public debt unprecedented, and its industrial base in semiconductors and rare earths dangerously exposed.

In a slowing world, the cost of confrontation rises. Xi’s “Chinese Dream” of a high-tech, sustainable economy needs continued access to American capital and innovation. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” needs access to the largest consumer market on Earth.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has tightened the screws further. With Iranian oil crippled, Beijing needs the energy flow uninterrupted, and Trump has the leverage. Both leaders know it.

Xi made the convergence explicit at the banquet, in a single line that will be re-read for months: “Achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can go hand in hand.”

It was the first time the leader of the Chinese Communist Party has publicly endorsed an American political slogan. Trump raised his glass.

After nearly a decade of trade wars and chip-export controls, both sides have arrived at the same conclusion. Neither can win.

And the worst case scenario is already playing out. Both leaders are increasingly distrusted by the rest of the world. That makes the bilateral alignment more valuable to each of them, not less.

A decade ago, Beijing was the rising party seeking acknowledgement. This week, Xi sat across from Trump as a co-equal. Trump accepted the framing.

The unipolar moment ended somewhere between the 2008 financial crisis and Donald Trump’s second inauguration. This week in Beijing was the formal recognition of it.

Where the grey ends

There remains one structural risk: Taiwan.

Xi was unusually pointed on the issue during the bilateral, warning Trump that mishandling Taiwan would push the relationship “into an extremely dangerous situation” of “collision and conflict”.

Beijing chose to release these comments while Trump was still in the country. The framework of strategic stability does not extend to what China considers its red line.

The toasts themselves contained no mention of Taiwan. The hard line was for the bilateral, the soft line for the cameras.

Trump, asked about Taiwan at the Temple of Heaven, deflected with “China is beautiful” and changed the subject. That is not endorsement. But nor is it the unconditional defence Taipei would want to hear.

The new bipolar order, then, is not a stable equilibrium. It is a managed one. It depends on each side resisting the temptation to test the other on the one issue where both have publicly committed to no compromise.

For Australia and other middle powers, the implications run deep. The strategic competition framework that Canberra used to align with Washington has been quietly retired in favour of something messier and more transactional.

The two superpowers have now stood side by side and called themselves partners, friends, co-stewards of the giant ship of human history.

America and China are no longer enemies-in-waiting. They are two slowing giants who have agreed, in Beijing this week, that they need each other more than they once admitted.

The rest of the world has been preparing for a cold war. It has been handed a partnership of necessity between two superpowers who have both reached the limits of confrontation.

That is the order we now live in. And the rest of us will have to adjust.

May 19, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | China, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Trump‑Xi summit: Cautious Progress On Trade, Ties And Some ‘Win‑Wins’.

But importantly, Xi and Trump agreed to establish a Board of Trade and Board of Investment – intended to create a pathway forward to more trade in the months to come.

 May 16, 2026 , Yan Bennett for the Conversation, https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/16/trump-xi-summit-cautious-progress-on-trade-ties-and-some-win-wins/

President Donald Trump departed China on May 15, 2026, after a two-day summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping that was scrutinized from every angle for clues on where the relationship is heading.

Trump hailed the trip as “incredible,” while Xi remarked that it marked a “new bilateral relationship.” Other observers were a little less enthusiastic, noting that no major breakthroughs were evident at the highly anticipated meeting of the world’s two most powerful political leaders.

The Conversation turned to Yan Bennett, an expert in U.S.-China relations and author of “American Policy Discourses on China,” to provide her three big takeaways from the summit.

Taiwan: Tough(ish) talk but status quo in place

No one really expected there to be movement on Taiwan – which mainland China lays claims over – although it is clear that Beijing would like the United States to make a firmer stance against the island moving toward a declaration of independence, or for the U.S. to expressly demand reunification.

So what we got was Beijing reiterating that Taiwan remained a priority and a core interest. Xi did this on the first day of the summit, noting that the Taiwan “question” remained “the most important issue in China-U.S. relations,” and that any mishandling of it could lead to “clashes and even conflicts.”

But this was aimed at two things. First, Xi has a domestic audience he needs to address, and Taiwan has long been important to Chinese rhetoric. The Chinese Communist Party has around 100 million members, many of whom would have expected Xi to talk tough on Taiwan – and it was those people he was largely talking to.

But he was also signaling to the U.S. that it shouldn’t support Taiwanese independence. And that won’t ruffle any feathers in Washington. Indeed, the 2025 National Security Strategy stressed that the U.S. opposed unilateral action on Taiwan from “either party” – a signal to Beijing that it opposed Taiwan declaring independence.

Trump did mention arms deals to Taiwan. But the U.S.’s declaratory policy since the Reagan administration is that it doesn’t allow Beijing to enter discussions about what weapons Washington sells to Taiwan. And that hasn’t changed at all, nor has the U.S.’s treaty commitment to Taiwan since 1979 that requires the U.S. to provide Taiwan with defensive weapons to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability.

Rhetoric aside, everyone is happy with the status quo on Taiwan – it is in no one’s interest for it to change.

But talk of Taiwan has been muddied a little by Xi’s determination to modernize the People’s Liberation Army. The Chinese president has laid out a series of benchmarks including that the PLA should be capable of invading Taiwan by 2027. This has been misinterpreted in the U.S. under the so-called “Davidson window” – a concept that has it that China is intent on invading by that time.

In reality, China is nowhere near able to do so. It doesn’t have a “blue water navy” able to operate without port assistance, and the island is incredibly difficult to invade – it only has two places where you can land, and only at certain times of the year. It is also very mountainous. Taiwan is also slowly building its defenses – and learning a lot from Ukraine’s war with Russia – with the intention of becoming “indigestable” to China.

Xi’s modernization timeline also states that the PLA should be a “world class military” – taken to be a peer to the U.S. – by 2049. But the fact that it spends more on internal security than it does on defense indicates where the CCP’s true interests lay – in domestic security rather than external capabilities.

Trade: Tamped down expectations

The big picture is that the U.S. and China have been trying to restabilize what was until fairly recently a very good relationship in terms of economic ties.

Both sides have clear priorities to that extent. China wants to regain the American market it had in the 1990s and early 2000s – and certainly reverse the trend since 2018’s trade war.

Trump since his first administration has made it clear that he sees Chinese control over supply chains and the trade imbalance as a national security issue. Washington also wants to address unfair trade practices, such as the requirement that American companies hand over blueprints, trade secrets, customer lists, marketing plans and more to operate.

So what was achieved in the summit? On the surface, very little. There was some movement on sales of U.S. beef to China. And Trump announced that Beijing would buy 200 aircraft from Boeing – lower than the 500 that had been earlier touted in media reports. And several Chinese companies agreed to buy Nvidia microchips – a continuation of a process that began in late 2025.

That doesn’t seem much, and it was telling that Trump himself wasn’t being very “Trumpian” on what could be achieved during the summit. He wasn’t promising the moon.

A lot of focus will be on technology. China is about 18 months behind the U.S. in microchip development. Some have questioned whether U.S. companies should be selling chips to China, amid fears that China could steal the intellectual property and be able to use higher-technology chips for defense reasons. The U.S. position is it can’t allow Huawei – China’s telecom giant – to take over the whole Chinese market, so it will only allow the sale of what it considers appropriate-level Nvidia chips.

Military matters: Washington wants to talk

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the U.S. always kept the military lines of communications open to avert a catastrophic incident. This hasn’t been the case with Beijing and Washington. We saw that in 2001 when a U.S. aircraft collided with a Chinese jet; and again over the “Chinese spy balloon incident” in 2023.

Washington is seeking to open up a line of communication on military matters, and that is probably why U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was there in Beijing. Indeed, it is highly unusual for a defense secretary to be at such a summit.

Not that Trump believes he needs China’s help on military matters. He made that clear when asked about possible Beijing assistance prior to the summit.

In fact, little news came out of the summit on Iran. China has criticized the U.S. over the war, but has also quietly been telling Tehran to stop bombing Gulf countries.

Despite some commentary suggesting that Beijing benefits from the U.S. being bogged down in the Middle East, what Xi will want is a resolution before the economic fallout bites in China.

China’s stockpile of Iranian oil will only last a few more weeks and then oil price rises will hit China like a brick.

May 19, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | China, politics international, USA | Leave a comment