The year’s best stories

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

It’s been a year of patience for China, as the country struggles to shake off the long economic hangover of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

It’s been a year of patience for China, as the country struggles to shake off the long economic hangover of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chinese President Xi Jinping seems more than willing to wait. He has maintained a seemingly unbreakable grip on power, well past the point at which he was expected to step down, and retirement is nowhere in sight.

This year, Xi guided China through high-stakes trade clashes with the United States and, less successfully, through continued economic challenges on the home front. Though this year certainly underscored Beijing’s economic clout on the world stage, with the boom decades now in the rear view, the path ahead is far less clear.

Below are four trends that China Brief followed in 2025.

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Many people expected U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs to set the United States on a collision course with China. Few, however, anticipated just how decisively Beijing would prevail in this game of chicken.

After Trump announced a broad package of tariffs on most U.S. trading partners in April that threatened to crush U.S.-China trade, both sides seemed to recognize the need for negotiation. A fragile truce was reached in May, but it soon gave way to months of renewed escalation and retaliation, followed by an extraordinary climbdown after Trump and Xi’s face-to-face meeting in October.

Since then, Trump has gone out of his way to accommodate Xi, seemingly eager to secure a trade deal: He has pressured Japan to soften its stance on Taiwan, attempted to neuter U.S. government actions that might antagonize Beijing, and

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