What Chinese leaders really think about Trump

Beijing. US President Donald Trump says his recent meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping – the first of his second term – was “surprising.” Although Trump based his campaign on the promise of putting pressure on the US’s biggest geopolitical competitor, the reality was very different. On the contrary, prominent Chinese academics and retired military leaders I spoke to in Beijing agree that Xi’s international strategy has proven its validity and that an increasingly fragmented multipolar world greatly benefits China.

The Chinese view is that we are entering a prolonged period of counter-globalization. For a country that relies on export-led growth to climb out of poverty, this prospect could seem problematic. However, Chinese leaders are not at all worried. In his view, the post-Cold War order aimed to create a unified global market and promote democracy and human rights through common rules and institutions. Instead of a single market, however, we have a world divided into three regional economic blocs: North America, led by the United States (including Mexico and Central America), an emerging European region still struggling to define itself, and a sprawling Chinese region that includes members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), much of South America, countries in Africa, and the rest of the Global South.

Instead of democracy and human rights, the Chinese expect a further expansion of autocracy and illiberal democracy. Globalization should mean that individual rights take precedence over sovereignty and liberal democracy over autocracy. But as my Chinese interlocutors point out, sovereignty today systematically takes precedence over human rights. If even the United States exhibits authoritarian characteristics, would-be authoritarians around the world have much less to worry about.

Finally, my interlocutors believe that economic fragmentation and the authoritarian turn will facilitate a return to politics shaped by the ambition and personal charisma of rulers rather than by the institutions and norms created after the Second World War. Geopolitical outcomes depend less and less on structural factors such as geography, power dynamics and resources and more on interactions and calculations between leaders. Personal interests will continue to take the place of national interests. There will be agreements, not contracts; Egos, not ideology.

In short, international relations will be more personalized and unpredictable today than at any time since the First World War. Back then, the fate of the world depended on the whims of Tsar Nicholas II, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph. Today it is Trump, Xi Jinping; Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi; Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other similar figures who make the decisions.

The Chinese credit Trump with accelerating global development. From his perspective, his “America First” project combines two goals. The first is to establish a regional security order through which the United States outsources the most difficult task of containing major powers. So the Europeans will take responsibility for containing Russia, the Japanese and Australians will step up their efforts to contain China, and Israel and the Gulf states will deal with Iran. This allows Trump to concentrate on the second goal: the search for friendly relations and the conclusion of agreements with the other major leaders, be it Putin in Anchorage, Xi in Busan or, in the future, even with the Iranian leadership.

The Chinese would of course welcome such an agreement. Some even see this as a unique opportunity to reach an agreement with Trump over Taiwan, potentially ending the island’s de facto independence in return for a vague promise to “freeze” the current regional security order in the rest of the world.

But a world divided into spheres of influence also poses risks, from fierce technological competition to multiple uses of extraterritorial jurisdiction and secondary sanctions. Therefore, China has studied the United States’ vulnerabilities and identified vulnerabilities that it can exploit (its trump cards). His export controls on rare earths surprised the Americans and forced them to negotiate, allowing Xi Jinping to strike a favorable deal with Trump.

But despite the apparent self-confidence that China shows to the outside world, my interlocutors did point to certain internal weaknesses and foibles. Growth is gradually slowing, consumer confidence is low and exorbitant local government debt remains a serious problem. A recurring theme in many of my conversations was the collapse of optimism.

Another concept was “involution”: the fierce competition between Chinese companies that drove prices so low that deflation occurred. This leads to hyper-consumerism (electric vehicles lose half their value in a few months), fierce competition among students and a general feeling of “constant struggle” among workers. People from all walks of life feel trapped and afraid. Young people in particular no longer believe that they will be better off than their parents.

The real test for China may lie not in the yet-to-be-defined contours of a new world order, but in how Xi deals with the paradox between external power and internal fragility.

*Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, he is the author of “The Era Without Peace”. How Connectivity Generates Conflict (Rialp Press, 2024).