“You
know, when you look at the odds, China is a very, very powerful, big country.
That’s a very small island. Think of it, it’s 59 miles away. 59 miles. We’re
9,500 miles away. That’s a little bit of a difficult problem,”
President
Donald J. Trump, May 2026
May 19. Trump
called his May 2026 visit to China a “historic moment”. It was but not for the
reasons Trump implied. Xi’s messages to Trump were clear. First, the US must
not interfere with China’s ‘inevitable’ rise to supremacy by, for example,
stopping the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Second, Taiwan is
Chinese. Third, China and the US are engaged in a geopolitical struggle for
everything under the heavens that will define the twenty-first century.
Tianxia or ‘everything
under heaven’ dates to ancient China and was a metaphor for Imperial China’s control
by divine right of everything in the known world in pursuit of order. Imposing order
is the very essence of Xi’s dictatorship and the Chinese Communist Party. Control can come in many forms – direct conquest
of the South China Sea), coercion of much of the Pacific Rim, vassalage through
debt and other means (Russia and the Belt and Road Initiative), and
intimidation and deterrence (the US and the wider West).
Trump was
not treated as an honoured guest but a supplicant. Xi went out of his way to quietly humiliate
the American president. The touted sale
of up to 500 Boeing 737 Max aircraft was reduced to 200. Xi suggested that the US was a declining
power and that by inference China is the rising power. There was also a notable lack of coverage of Trump’s
visit in the Chinese media. He also warned Trump not to interfere in
China’s ‘internal affairs’ most notably Taiwan.
In the Chinese lexicon of diplomacy such insults are just about as
strong as it gets, even if Trump did get a visit to a sacred garden normally
denied other visiting dignitaries.
Trump for
his part, and in a very un-Trumpian way, seemed to be doing his best to Kowtow
to Xi. Make America Great Again? Trump
even suggested that Xi had not really meant that the US was a declining power, but
only that the US had declined during the Biden administration. This is nonsense. Xi knew exactly what he was
saying. He even warned the Americans not to fall into The Thucydides Trap. In The
Melian Dialogue the 5th century BC, “The
strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept”. The Trap is when a declining power fights a rising power to prevent the
latter reaching a position of inevitable dominance. In 5th century BC
Europe Sparta attacked Athens because it feared the growing power of the Athenians.
Xi was suggesting the Americans are Sparta to China’s Athens.
I have just finished the main draft of my
latest book – War and Peace in the Indo-Pacific (Hurst 2027) which will be
brilliant and very reasonably-priced. For almost two years I have immersed
myself in all matters Indo-Pacific, particularly the China-US
relationship. The conclusion of my
analysis? First, Xi is right about
Taiwan, Beijing wants it far more than Washington and the US will not go to war
with the People’s Republic of China over it.
Second, if China seeks Tianxia, everything under heaven across the
entirety of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, then World War Three beckons.
Some of you
will be old enough to remember ‘Ping pong Diplomacy’. In 1971, US table tennis
player Glen Cowan played China’s Zuang Zhedong at the World Table Tennis
Championships in Japan. Amazingly, the
match led to a diplomatic breakthrough between Nixon’s America and Mao’s China
and the establishment of economic and diplomatic relations severed during the
Korean War in 1952. What we witnessed during Trump’s visit to China last week
was the opposite of diplomacy. Rather, it revealed the extent of Xi’s strategic
ambition and raised the question of the twenty-first century: would China be
satisfied with recovering Taiwan or is Beijing set on a grand strategic collision
course with the US.
Trump
sought a deal in Beijing, what he got in return was a lecture on Chinese power
and a warning not to try and contain it.
Julian
Lindley-French
