Features | Diplomacy | East Asia

When Trump Goes to China: It’s the Strategy That Matters

The Trump-Xi summit itself is likely to be less important than the divergent strategies that it may reveal.

U.S. President Donald Trump greets Chinese President Xi Jinping before a bilateral meeting at the Gimhae International Airport terminal in Busan, South Korea, Oct. 30, 2025.

When U.S. President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping finally meet in mid-May in Beijing, the optics will be grand and the words may be noteworthy, but the outcome is unlikely to be earth-shattering. Idle speculation about a China-U.S. G-2 condominium or pronouncements that fundamentally alter the nature of the rivalry is largely baseless.

The trip, however, may offer a revealing window into the divergent strategic approaches of the two leaders. In that sense, Trump’s second highly choreographed reception in the Forbidden City may still mark a milestone in a bilateral competition that, at present, is trending in China’s direction.

Tactical Truce, Strategic Rivalry

Both leaders need the summit to reinforce their respective visions of strategic stability. For Trump, that means demonstrating strength on the global stage by projecting the United States as the one superpower capable of wielding both hard power and economic dynamism. For Xi, it means preserving sufficient global stability to keep China’s long-range development plans on track.

China has become a well-trodden destination for leaders in search of economic growth and strategic ballast. Consider the steady stream of visits over the past year. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made his second visit last July. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Xi in Tianjin last August, the first such meeting since the deadly 2020 border clash, underscoring that economics still compels a modicum of cooperation. French President Emmanuel Macron met Xi for the fourth time in China last December. South Korea’s Lee Jae-myung, Canada’s Mark Carney, and the United Kingdom’s Keir Starmer followed in January, with Germany’s Friedrich Merz arriving in February. The decks had been cleared for Trump’s visit at the end of March – until the Iran conflict forced a six-week delay.

There is no gainsaying that when the leaders of the world’s two largest economies and chief competitors meet, more is at stake than the bilateral relationship alone. Even if the broad contours of the summit’s outcomes can be anticipated, an unscripted element remains. Both leaders, while seeking a prolonged trade truce in the name of stability, are simultaneously competing for advantage. The likely reaffirmation of that truce will reflect tactical restraint, not strategic convergence, as both sides race to eliminate chokepoints and reduce dependence.

What ultimately matters is not the improvisational phrases Trump might utter or be maneuvered into by a meticulously prepared Xi, but the contrast between their strategic approaches. Trump’s approach, if not a fully formed strategy, remains episodic, transactional, and politically contested at home and abroad. Xi’s, by contrast, is comprehensive, institutionalized, and generational.

To understand that asymmetry, one must examine how Xi has reordered China’s priorities.

From Growth First to Security First

Xi has fundamentally inverted the reform-era hierarchy between development and security.

After 1949, Mao Zedong prioritized regime security and ideological control over economic growth. Deng Xiaoping reversed that hierarchy, elevating economic development as the central objective and adopting the posture later described as “hide your strength, bide your time” (韬光养晦). Growth became the foundation of national power.

Since 2012, Xi has restored national security as the organizing principle of governance. Economic modernization has not been abandoned, but it has been subordinated to a comprehensive national security strategy. Military-civil fusion, technological self-reliance, intelligentized warfare, regime control, and global rule-shaping are integrated into a single system designed to reinforce comprehensive national power.

Security is no longer a byproduct of policy. It is the framework within which all policy operates.

Xi institutionalized this shift early in his tenure.

The “China Dream” of national rejuvenation, announced in 2012, tied regime survival to long-term geopolitical restoration by 2049. The creation of the Central National Security Commission in 2013 centralized security authority. In 2014, Xi introduced the “Overall National Security Concept” (总体国家安全观), formalizing a holistic view of traditional and nontraditional security across political, military, economic, financial, technological, ecological, cyber, data, space, deep sea, polar, biological, and other domains.

The key word is “overall.” Security encompasses the full spectrum of state activity. It fuses ideology, industrial policy, military modernization, and technological ambition under one organizing principle within “Xi Jinping Thought.” 

Industrial policy, therefore, became a national security policy. Initiatives such as Made in China 2025 were absorbed into this broader security architecture, linking advanced manufacturing, supply-chain control, and technological sovereignty directly to regime resilience and strategic competition.

Five-Year Plans as Strategic Blueprint

China’s Five-Year Plans chronicle Xi’s steady transition from prioritizing growth to prioritizing resilience.

The 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020) marked a decisive turn toward security-centric development. It accelerated indigenous innovation, focused on advanced manufacturing, and elevated strategic sectors such as semiconductors, aerospace, and quantum communications, as pillars of national power.

The 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) formalized “dual circulation.” Domestic resilience became the anchor of development, reducing vulnerability to external pressure while selectively leveraging global markets. Technological self-reliance and supply-chain security were treated as strategic imperatives amid “changes unseen in a century.”

The 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030), which was officially approved in March, further consolidates this trajectory: securing development through security and promoting security through development. Reform means resilience-building rather than liberalization. Technology self-reliance and dominance provide security in China’s plan, while civil-military fusion allows industries to be less vulnerable to external threats and establish internal supply chains. 

In doubling down on the pursuit of frontier technology as “new productive forces,” Xi has sought to leapfrog from intellectual property theft and emulating U.S. technology to owning the contest for wholly new innovations. One glaring example of this is Xi’s recent comment about China chasing real innovation by seeking a “zero to one” technology innovation strategy, versus simply copying or refining the technological creations of others.  Ironically, the idea of “zero to one” is not original, but the title and concept of Peter Thiel and Blake Masters’ 2014 major best-selling business book, based on a Stanford University class on tech start-ups. Still, Xi undoubtedly eyes extending the “one” factor by increasing the volume of innovation, startups, and uniqueness while creating strategic advantages for Chinese technology. 

Xi’s transitioning of China from fast-follower to true tech innovator has many motives. Xi is problem-solving at home, seeking to leapfrog the United States’ technological dominance, and creating end-to-end ecosystems that minimize foreign dependence.........

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