I write this after President Trump had spent a day in Beijing and held one meeting with the Chinese President Xi Jinping. He may have returned to Washington by the time the article is published and even then, we will not know exactly what transpired at the summit or whether there were any breakthroughs in the understanding between the two countries. The meeting with the Chinese president was initially scheduled for April but was delayed because of escalating tensions with Iran. Instead, the summit took place on May 14 in Beijing.

There is a fairly long history of high-level contacts between the top leaders of the two countries. "Unless they have amnesia, China should remember quite vividly how during Trump's first term, the U.S. imposed multiple rounds of tariff under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 on China during negotiations," said Sarah Schumann, a former US trade official who is now the managing director at Boston Global Strategies. The administration still has multiple options "to increase tariffs on China in pretty short order," she added. US officials spoke at length about the meeting before President Trump flew to Beijing on May 13. On May 8, Jamieson Greer, a trade adviser to the president, sketched out a long list of concerns that the administration planned to raise - from its adherence to past purchase agreements to its approach to artificial intelligence. "There is not a situation where we get China to change the way they govern, the way they manage their economy; that's all baked into their........

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