Xi’s latest terms for the American relationship, Trump’s post-summit verbal meandering, cybercrime operations’ new base, the west’s dominance is an historical ‘aberration’, and the Modi government’s all-veg banquets.

Xi Jinping and Donald Trump had different aims when they met in Beijing last week. Trump was looking for tangible wins but Xi was pursuing something bigger: to redefine the two countries’ relationship in terms China can live with.

Xi wanted US acceptance of what he has called a ‘constructive, strategic and stable relationship’.

The phrase matters far more than it sounds, says Tan Dawn Wei, s senior columnist with Singapore’s The Straits Times. Tan, the paper’s former China bureau chief, says Chinese diplomacy places enormous weight on formal definitions and political formulations.

“Once elevated into official discourse by the top leadership, they become organising principles,” she says…”[T]hey are not semantic exercises but attempts to establish the political terms of engagement.”

For years, Beijing resisted Washington’s view of the relationship as fundamentally competitive, seeing it as a way to contain China’s rise. Beijing’s new tack is to concede that rivalry is structural and will continue, Tan says, but it is trying to shape the terms of that competition.

“In Beijing’s view, ‘constructive strategic stability’ means rivalry that remains bounded and predictable,” Tan says. “China is signalling that it can live with economic, technological and geopolitical competition as long as both sides avoid pushing the relationship into outright confrontation.”

Tan’s colleague, Bhagyashree Garekar, the paper’s US bureau chief, says Beijing’s freshly minted phrase is now being parsed in Washington.

She quotes Yun Sun, a Chinese specialist at the Stimson Centre, a Washington think-tank, as saying US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a meeting last year with Wang Yi, his Chinese counterpart, said the US and China should aim for some type of strategic stability.

“The new (phrase) ‘constructive and strategic stability’ implies some level of parity has been reached between the two,” Garekar says.

Global Times, one of China’s official newspapers, published a commentary in the form of a long interview with Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University. Wu says the formulation ‘a constructive relationship of strategic stability’ dilutes the narrative of China-US competition and improves expectations surrounding bilateral ties.

“If both sides continue working towards this goal, it would mean the two countries have found a new paradigm of major-country relations for the 21st century and can avoid the ‘Thucydides Trap’,” Wu says.

Xi met Trump last week and hosted Vladimir Putin this week. The South China Morning Post says Trump’s visit was framed around managing risks but Xi and the Russian President reached a raft of agreements and pledged deeper co-operation, including declaring they would push for a multipolar world order.

Anger over Trump talk of Taiwan bargaining chip

Donald Trump said nothing had changed on US policy towards Taiwan following his summit with Xi Jinping but some Asian media commentators didn’t quite believe him. His verbal meandering on the issue has sown confusion and anxiety.

Xi warned Trump that if the Taiwan issue were mishandled, the US and China could collide or even come into conflict.

Trump said later: “China is a very powerful, big country. That’s a very small island.

“It (China) is 59 miles away. We’re 9,500 miles away. That’s a bit of a difficult problem.

“They have someone there (in Taiwan) now that wants to go independent. Well, that’s a risky thing. They want to go independent because they want to get into a war and… they figure........

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