Beijing gets ready to welcome ‘lame duck’ Trump and Putin

November 8, 2026 — 4:00am

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Beijing: When Donald Trump swings into China for the APEC summit this month it will be as a wounded figure, his party thoroughly routed at home and his MAGA movement facing a biblical reckoning.

Domestic political verdicts don’t necessarily translate to policy shifts on the world stage but they can cast a long shadow.

Against the backdrop of Republican incineration at the midterms, Trump is expected to sit down with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Shenzhen during the November 18-19 summit. The meeting would be historic, if unnerving for Washington’s allies alarmed at Trump’s admiration for his rivals.

Beijing, too, is wary of being cast as a great power carving up spheres of influence and redrawing maps around a negotiating table, an image that contradicts its solidarity pitch to the Global South as the shared losers of last century’s power dynamics.

The agenda could be unruly, spanning the Ukraine war, Iran war and trade.

Putin proposed it. Trump is open to it. This leaves Xi holding the cards as to whether he will agree to host it. China’s foreign ministry has confirmed discussions are under way.

“It is very likely to happen,” says Wu Xinbo, the director of the Centre for American Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University, who........

© Brisbane Times