If there was a geopolitical theatre, it was set in Beijing earlier this month, where US President Donald Trump arrived with a jet full of CEOs and tech bosses in tow, turning up at Xi Jinping’s doorstep in a way that felt less like a routine diplomatic visit and more like a Trump-style performance — built for spectacle, but with little substance. If that was not enough, Vladimir Putin swung by the Chinese capital just days after the American delegation had left, adding another layer of symbolism to a week in which Xi appeared, almost casually, at the centre of the entire geopolitical frame, while Trump left with statements, photo opportunities, and much the same agenda he had arrived with.
But the visit is not only about choreography or the optics of great-power performance. It is also about tone, and the shifting language Trump brought with him before and during the trip. For much of his first term, he presented China as something close to an arch-nemesis, the enemy of the American people in a distinctly Maoist register of political language that he has often borrowed from and inverted, the systemic rival that Washington had to confront in Cold War terms. While that framing has not disappeared entirely, it has softened in ways that are hard to ignore.
Much to the surprise of parts of his MAGA base, which had been conditioned over years to see Beijing as an almost existential threat, Trump’s posture on China has shifted — not just in rhetoric, but in policy as well. That change can be seen most clearly when you go back to the documents that shaped his first term and compare them with what is being produced now. The 2017 National Security Strategy spoke in blunt civilisational terms, describing China as a power seeking to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific, expand its state-driven economic model, and reorder the regional balance in its favour. Fast forward eight years and the language is noticeably different in texture, even when the underlying rivalry remains. The focus now is overwhelmingly economic, tariffs, supply chains, and technological competition, while the military dimension, though still present, sits more in the background.
If there is a line that captures this shift in emphasis, it is the idea that maintaining American economic and technological superiority is now seen as the surest way to deter large-scale conflict. The Trump administration’s approach toward China is therefore less about confrontation in traditional security terms and more about dominance through economic architecture.
But that does not mean the security establishment in Washington has moved in the same direction. Pentagon assessments continue to describe China’s expansion across military, cyber, nuclear, and artificial intelligence domains in far more alarming terms, almost in a different register from Trump’s White House framing. As one analyst described it in the New York Times, it is as if two separate languages of threat perception are being spoken inside the same system.
What this divergence reveals is that the shift on Beijing is, at its core, centred on the president himself. In his second term, and perhaps shaped by the broader economic environment he has set in motion, he appears far more comfortable dealing with strong leaders like Xi and Putin, figures he seems to view as transactional, even legible in their predictability once deals are struck. Within that setting, whenever economic priorities collide with security concerns, it is usually the economic logic that wins out for Trump — a leader who is, in his own way, transactional.
For Ashok Swain, professor of peace and conflict at Uppsala University, the pattern is not contradictory so much as familiar: “This was classic Trump. He used China as a campaign bogeyman and is now dealing with Xi as a negotiating partner. It suggests not strategy, but transaction.” He added that Trump’s anti-China rhetoric mobilises MAGA, but in Beijing he sought deals, flattery, and crisis management rather than confrontation. The trip, he said, produced spectacle but little clarity on outcomes that favour Trump or the US.
On the broader shift in how China is framed as a strategic challenge, Swain said the change is significant, moving from viewing Beijing primarily as a security threat to treating it more as an economic partner. The current strategy, he said, reflects a logic of “winning the economic future while preventing military confrontation,” with emphasis on trade rebalancing, technology, supply chains, and deterrence. It ultimately reinforces, he added, a long-standing reading of Trump: that he sees China less ideologically than commercially.
The optics
During the trip, there were the carefully staged photo-ops with President Xi, including the familiar handshake moment where Trump tries to pull world leaders toward him as a signal of strength, even if the effect is more theatrical than decisive. Xi, for his part, hardly looked like a novice to the Trump ritual, having encountered his US counterpart on multiple occasions and long since learned how to meet that performance on his own terms. One image, in particular, stands out: Trump seated beside Xi, the Chinese leader upright and composed, while Trump appears slouched, almost sinking into the sofa, a visual that needed no commentary on the dynamic in the room.
From the outside, the choreography of the visit appeared seamless: military parades, cheering children, carefully staged ceremonies, and scenes of Trump being shown flowers inside the Communist Party headquarters in the heart of Beijing. But beyond the spectacle, there were remarkably few concrete announcements. Trump claimed China would purchase 200 Boeing aircraft and billions of dollars of American agricultural products. He also suggested Xi would help him end the war in Iran. Xi, meanwhile, wasted no time and used the visit to reiterate Beijing’s position on Taiwan, pressing Washington to end arms sales to the self-governing island that China claims as its own, even warning that the issue could become a source of conflict between the two powers.
Analysts watching the trip closely were unanimous in saying that Washington achieved little, and in some readings even absorbed a few subtle snubs along the way. One moment that circulated widely came when Trump, during a visit to the gardens of the Communist Party headquarters, asked whether any other world leader had received a similar tour with Xi, to which the Chinese leader reportedly responded that Putin had been there before.
Overall, the optics, Swain noted, favored Xi. “The Zhongnanhai garden walk, rare access, controlled tone, and Trump’s deferential body language allowed Beijing to present China as an ancient but modern, rising but confident power receiving an American president on its terms. Trump got shows, Xi gained stature.”
While the Middle East crisis shadowed the trip, Trump secured no concessions on that front in his meeting with his counterpart. The US president and officials from his administration sent mixed signals about how much assistance they were seeking from Beijing in pushing Iran back to the negotiating table. “We feel very similar about how we want it to end. We don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon. We want the straits open,” Trump himself claimed.
But any sense of alignment was quickly dispelled by Beijing’s official machinery. China’s foreign ministry made clear it would not be pulled into any expanded role beyond its stated position, reiterating that “this conflict, which should never have happened, has no reason to continue.” It added that China had been “working tirelessly to end the fighting and strive for peace,” pointing to Xi’s four-point proposal on the Middle East issued prior to the visit.
Commenting on the exchanges between the two leaders on the most sensitive issues such as Iran and Taiwan, Swain from Uppsala University, said: “On Iran, Trump wanted Xi’s help. On Taiwan, he gave in to China.”
Putin in Beijing
Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin visited Beijing for talks with Xi only days after Trump had done the same, and from a distance the choreography looked almost interchangeable — the handshakes, the military honour guards, the tightly staged smiles, even the crowds of children arranged as part of the show. But Putin’s visit so soon after Trump’s carried something more deliberate: Moscow’s effort to signal that its relationship with Beijing remains intact, even central, despite shifting global alliances.
Putin and Xi used the meeting to deepen a web of trade and energy cooperation, while also touching on Russia’s war in Ukraine. And even in the aftermath of what Washington had projected as a relatively successful summit with Trump, Beijing did not hold back in restating its broader critique of US power. Xi went on to caution that the world remains “far from peaceful,” with unilateralism and hegemonism posing profound risks, and with global politics in danger of sliding back toward what he described as a “law of the jungle.”
That language appeared appropriate within the broader strategic convergence between Moscow and Beijing, both carry a shared mistrust of the West and a parallel ambition to dilute what both see as a US-led unipolar order.
Taken together, the back-to-back visits also served China’s broader diplomatic purpose. Hosting Trump and then Putin in quick succession allowed China to project itself as a central node in global diplomacy, a power capable of receiving rival leaders on its own terms, and of presenting itself as indispensable to any future global settlement.
For Swain the significance of Putin’s visit lay less in the bilateral substance and more in what it revealed about China’s positioning. “Putin’s visit after Trump’s allowed Beijing to signal that it is not choosing Washington over Moscow,” he noted. China, he added, is showing that it can host both rivals and partners, manage contradictions, and sit at the centre of a shifting global order, with a broader message for smaller powers: “do not outsource strategy to great-power promises.”
No gains for tech bosses
As President Trump met Chinese leader Xi Jinping, what stood out almost as much as the style of diplomacy itself was the presence of US corporate executives in the background, figures like Elon Musk of Tesla, Tim Cook of Apple, and Nvidia’s chief. More than two dozen tech bigwigs accompanied Trump on what was his first trip to China in nearly a decade, a business-heavy delegation that appeared designed to signal scale as much as intent.
At one point, the US president himself pointed to the group and said they were there “to pay respects” to Xi and to China. But their presence went well beyond the respect Trump alluded to. These companies are deeply embedded in the Chinese economy in ways that are difficult to unwind, even under initial pressure from the White House. Apple still relies heavily on Chinese manufacturing for its iPhone production. Tesla’s Shanghai factory is its largest globally. Nvidia, meanwhile, stands to gain billions if US export restrictions on advanced chips were ever eased or reshaped.
Some of the executives appeared cautiously upbeat after their meetings. Tesla’s Musk, whose presence drew particular attention and occasional controversy, suggested there were “many good things” coming out of the visit when asked about the outcome, though he offered little detail on what had actually been achieved.
According to analysts, the broader presence of the delegation also exposed a tension running through the visit. In Washington, there is an increasingly vocal argument that the US should reduce its economic exposure to China, particularly in sectors that could become strategically sensitive in a conflict scenario. Long before being re-elected, Trump himself pushed a similar line of argument, often blaming Biden for failing to prevent it. Advanced technologies, especially AI chips and high-end semiconductors, sit at the centre of that debate, with concerns that commercial flows today could translate into military capability tomorrow.
Whether those issues were discussed during the visit remains unclear. Questions around advanced chip technology reportedly came up in some form, but no details have been released on any concrete understandings.
For Swain, the presence of such a large tech delegation pointed to something more fundamental about the nature of the trip. “Trump’s foreign policy increasingly treats geopolitics as deal-making, with American technology firms as instruments of state power and market access as the real prize,” he said. That shift, he added, weakens the traditional language of the “China threat” and recasts it instead as bargaining, where strategic rivalry and commercial interest are no longer easily separated.Latest News, Breaking News & Top News Stories | The Express TribuneHAMMAD SARFRAZRead More