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The biggest mistake to make about U.S. President Donald Trump’s summit with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Beijing next month is to expect a spectacular breakthrough. Calls from American and Chinese scholars for a grand superpower bargain will go unheeded. But the second biggest mistake would be to write off the planned meeting as meaningless theater. It will be more than Xi giving Trump the “big, fat, hug” that the latter expects.

Both readings miss what more than five decades of U.S.-China presidential summitry show. These meetings rarely transform the relationship. What they can do, when handled well, is make a potentially dangerous rivalry less volatile. That matters more than ever now, with Trump’s war with Iran driving a global energy shock and adding fresh instability to an already fracturing international order.

The biggest mistake to make about U.S. President Donald Trump’s summit with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Beijing next month is to expect a spectacular breakthrough. Calls from American and Chinese scholars for a grand superpower bargain will go unheeded. But the second biggest mistake would be to write off the planned meeting as meaningless theater. It will be more than Xi giving Trump the “big, fat, hug” that the latter expects.

Both readings miss what more than five decades of U.S.-China presidential summitry show. These meetings rarely transform the relationship. What they can do, when handled well, is make a potentially dangerous rivalry less volatile. That matters more than ever now, with Trump’s war with Iran driving a global energy shock and adding fresh instability to an already fracturing international order.

This conclusion comes from a database of bilateral summits, sideline meetings, and calls assembled by the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. The data tracks 136 direct conversations between U.S. presidents and Chinese paramount leaders, from President Richard Nixon’s sit-down with Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong in February 1972 through Trump’s call with Xi in February. This historical record is a warning against both wishful thinking and cynicism.

When Trump lands in Beijing on May 14, he will become the first U.S. president to visit China in nearly a decade. The last, in November 2017, was Trump himself. In the years since, the relationship between the world’s two most powerful states has been battered by a trade war, a pandemic, a spy balloon, and a near-crisis over Taiwan. President Joe Biden never went, making him the first U.S. president since Jimmy Carter to leave office without visiting China. Trump and Xi’s own reunion came in October in Busan, South Korea, during a sideline meeting that produced a short-term tariff........

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