Trump’s visit to Beijing reveals how the balance of power – bilaterally and globally – has shifted to China’s advantage.

How polished are the Chinese, how delicate in their gestures! After two millennia’s experience in statecraft and the diplomatic arts, they can tell a visiting dignitary of high station that relations have changed — and with relations, the world order — even before the lapsang souchong is poured.

Donald Trump got the full treatment in Beijing. You saw this coming as soon as he descended the Air Force One stairs last Thursday (14 May) to begin his two-day summit with Xi Jinping. The Chinese leader was not at the airport to greet the American president: Xi left that to children with flags on sticks and his vice-president, the not-much-heard-of Han Zheng.

Nothing was said and a lot was said: this is a familiar feature in China’s diplomatic repertoire.

When Trump arrived at the Great Hall of the People a short while later, the semiology was yet plainer:  Xi stood at a distance, making no move forward as Trump loped in his familiar stoop, the stoop of the weary, toward him.

Here, worth a moment’s study, is the CBS News video of the occasion. The Chinese way with protocol, you have to marvel.

To say not much happened during Trump’s two days in the Chinese capital, as a lot of people seem to think, is to miss the forest for the trees. From his arrival until the farewell on Friday the Chinese leader let the Trumpster know – nothing hyperbolic here – that the leader of what some still insist on calling the ‘free world’ is no longer the leader of the world.

This is my read of what transpired in Beijing last Thursday and Friday.

Power has typically shifted westward in the great movements of modern history – from Imperial China to Europe and then across the Atlantic and onward across the continental United States.

The trans-Pacific drift has been evident for some time. Xi chose this moment to advise the 47th president of the United States that the migration of power is now irreversible and it is time for each side to take its place in a new order.

Beijing’s timing surprises me not at all. A year and some into Trump’s second term, he and his cabinet of incompetents have proven abjectly unserious about maintaining even a semblance of global order.

Long before Trump came along, the Chinese, along with the Russians, had begun to see the United States and its ‘rules-based order’ as a worrisome threat to stable international relations. Trump II’s lawlessness and aggression have prompted Beijing finally to intervene, so far by way of statecraft, against the world’s regression into a state of premodern chaos.

More specifically on the bilateral side, there is Washington’s running effort, dating to the Biden years, to actively subvert China’s technological advances and – also since the Biden presidency – the United States’ inch-at-a-time retreat from the commitments it made in 1979, when the Carter administration adopted the One China policy and shifted recognition from Taipei to Beijing.

Large arms sales to Taiwan – more than 30 during the Trump I, Biden and Trump II regimes; the US Navy’s incessant ‘freedom of navigation’ sailings through the Taiwan Strait; provocative visits to the island by Sinophobes such as Nancy Pelosi; Joe Biden’s repeated assertions that the United States will defend Taiwan militarily; tacit-if-not-stated approval of the independence movement: Beijing has had enough, and Xi – with another US arms sale worth $14 billion now pending – told Trump so as soon as they sat to talk last Thursday, first order of business.

This is not a new message, of course. Taiwan is Chinese territory as Long Island is American. How irritating the Chinese must find it when US officials and the media serving them incessantly repeat the phrase, “Taiwan, which China claims as its territory”.

But Xi’s quick, sharp........

© Pearls and Irritations