When US President Donald Trump welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to his palm-fringed Florida club for two days of meetings yesterday, the studied informality of the gathering was to bear the handiwork of two people: Chinese Ambassador to the US Cui Tiankai (崔天凱) and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Cui has established a busy back channel to Kushner, according to several officials briefed on the relationship.
The two men agreed on the club, Mar-a-Lago, as the site for the meeting, and the ambassador even sent Kushner drafts of a joint statement that China and the US could issue afterward.
Illustration: Mountain People
Kushner’s central role reflects the peculiar nature not only of the first meeting between Trump and Xi, but also of the broader relationship between the US and China in the early days of the Trump administration.
It is at once highly personal and bluntly transactional — a strategy that carries significant risks, experts said, given the economic and security issues that divide the countries.
While Chinese officials have found Trump a bewildering figure with a penchant for inflammatory statements, they have come to at least one clear judgment: In Trump’s Washington, his son-in-law is the man to know.
Kushner first made his influence felt in early February when he and Cui orchestrated a fence-mending telephone call between Trump and Xi.
During that exchange, Trump pledged to abide by the US’ four-decade-old “one China” policy on Taiwan, despite his earlier suggestion that it was up for negotiation.
Now, Trump wants something in return: He plans to press Xi to intensify economic sanctions against North Korea to pressure the country to shut down its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.
He has also vowed to protest the chronic trade imbalance between the US and China, which he railed against during his presidential campaign.
China’s courtship of Kushner, which has coincided with the marginalization of the US Department of State in the Trump administration, reflects a Chinese comfort with dynastic links.
Xi is himself a “princeling”: His father was Xi Zhongxun (習仲勳), a major figure in the communist revolution who was later purged by Mao Zedong (毛澤東).
Not only is Kushner married to the US president’s daughter Ivanka, but he is also one of his most influential advisers — a 36-year-old with no previous government experience, but an exceptionally broad portfolio under his father-in-law.
“Since [former US secretary of state Henry] Kissinger, the Chinese have been infatuated with gaining and maintaining access to the White House,” said Evan Medeiros, former US National Security Council senior director for Asian affairs in the administration of former US president Barack Obama. “Having access to the [US] president’s family and somebody they see as a princeling is even better.”
Former US officials and China experts said that the Chinese had prepared more carefully for this visit than the White House, which is still debating how harshly to confront Beijing, and which has yet to fill many important posts in the US Department of State.
Several said that if Trump presented China with an ultimatum on North Korea, it could backfire.
“China will either decide to help us with North Korea, or they won’t,” Trump said in an interview with the Financial Times that was published on Sunday. “And if they do, that will be very good for China, and if they don’t, it won’t be good for anyone.”
The US president said he had “great respect” for the Chinese leader, but he would tell him that “we cannot continue to trade if we are going to have an unfair deal like we have right now.”
Shortly after winning the election, Trump said he might use the “one China” policy, under which the US recognizes a single Chinese government in Beijing and has severed its diplomatic ties with Taiwan, as a bargaining chip for greater Chinese cooperation on trade or North Korea.
Trump had thrown that policy into doubt after taking a congratulatory telephone call from President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文). That caused consternation in Beijing and Xi refused to get on the telephone with Trump until he reaffirmed the policy.
After the two leaders finally spoke, White House officials said in a statement that the men had “discussed numerous topics, and president Trump agreed, at the request of president Xi, to honor our ‘one China’ policy.”
Trump insisted on that wording, according to a person briefed on the process, because he wanted to make clear that he had made a concession to Xi.
Since that call, Cui has continued to cultivate the Kushner family. Later in February, he invited Ivanka and the couple’s daughter, Arabella, to a reception at the Chinese embassy to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
Inside the White House, the most visible sign of Kushner’s influence on China policy came last month at the beginning of a meeting of the US National Security Council’s “principals committee” to discuss North Korea.
He was seated at the table in the Situation Room when General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, walked in.
Seeing no chairs open, Dunford headed for the backbenches, according to two people who were there.
Kushner, they said, quickly offered his chair to Dunford and took a seat along the wall.
While administration officials confirm that Kushner is deeply involved in China relations, they say that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has taken the lead on policy and made many of the decisions on the choreography and agenda of the meeting at Mar-a-Lago.
Last month, Tillerson made his first trip to Beijing as US secretary of state, during which he and Xi discussed the planning in a 30-minute meeting.
He was criticized afterward for repeating the phrases “mutual respect” and “win-win solutions,” which are drawn from the Chinese diplomatic lexicon and have been interpreted to assert a Chinese sphere of influence over the South China Sea and other disputed areas.
A senior US official said Tillerson applied his own meaning to those phrases — “win-win,” he said, was originally a US expression — and was not accepting China’s definition.
He said the US secretary had adopted a significantly tougher tone in private, particularly about China’s role in curbing North Korea’s provocations.
Kushner has passed on proposals he got from Cui to Tillerson, who in turn has circulated them among his staff in the US Department of State, officials said.
However, the department’s influence has been reduced as many positions remain unfilled, including that of assistant secretary for East Asian affairs.
Though Tillerson has kept a low profile, officials said he was trying to develop his own relationship with Trump at regular lunches and dinners.
Kushner’s involvement in China policy prompted questions after reports that his company was negotiating with a politically connected Chinese firm to invest hundreds of millions of US dollars in his family’s flagship property, 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
On Wednesday last week, amid the glare of negative publicity, Kushner’s company ended negotiations with the firm, the Anbang Insurance Group.
Another question hanging over the meeting is whether the hardliners in the White House will wield their influence. Trump ran for the US presidency on a stridently anti-China platform, accusing the Chinese, wrongly, of continuing to depress the value of their currency, and threatening to impose a 45 percent tariff on Chinese imports.
The architects of that policy — White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon and White House National Trade Council Director Peter Navarro — have said little publicly about China since entering the White House.
However, on Thursday last week, Trump predicted that the meeting would be “very difficult” because, as he said on Twitter, the US would no longer tolerate “massive trade deficits.”
By inviting Xi to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s “summer White House,” the US president is conferring on him the same status as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who spent two days in Florida, playing golf with the US president and responding to a crisis after North Korea tested a ballistic missile.
Such a gesture is particularly valuable, experts said, given that China is not an ally like Japan.
Xi does not play golf — as part of his anti-corruption campaign, he cracked down on Chinese Communist Party officials’ playing the sport — so he and Trump will have to find other ways to fill the 25 hours that the Chinese president will be at the club.
Yesterday evening, Trump and his wife, Melania, were to host Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan (彭麗媛), for dinner.
There are obvious parallels between the Mar-a-Lago meeting and the 2013 summit meeting at Sunnylands in California, Walter Annenberg’s 81 hectare estate, where Obama and Xi got acquainted over long walks in the desert landscape and a dinner of grilled porterhouse steaks and cherry pie. However, there are important differences, too.
By the time Obama met with Xi in California, they had met once before, when Xi was the Chinese vice president.
Xi held extensive meetings with former US vice president Joe Biden, traveling with him around the US.
Some former officials said the Mar-a-Lago meeting might reveal the disparity in experience between the two leaders and their teams.
“Sunnylands was difficult because Xi was new, while Obama had his sea legs,” Medeiros said. “What’s interesting is that the polarity here is reversed. Xi has his sea legs; Trump does not.”
Additional reporting by Adam Goldman
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers