US President Donald Trump might have grabbed the headlines during last week’s Asia tour, but deft diplomacy made his rival, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the star of the show.
The leaders found common ground on some of their most contentious issues when they met on the sidelines of the APEC summit in South Korea. China would suspend certain controls on rare earth exports and restart purchases of US farm goods. In return, the US would freeze parts of its tariff program and halve fentanyl-related duties. However, this is temporary — some of the measures are only meant to last one year.
Then, Trump left — but Xi stayed on, using the forum to press ahead with China’s ambition to become the region’s most significant power.
His diplomatic efforts are a sharp foil to Trump’s transactional “America first” approach. The strategy is not new, but the stakes are far higher now. Xi pledged openness and supply chain stability, positioning Beijing as a champion of the global order Washington built, but now undermines through its punitive trade tariffs.
That image, of course, is complicated. Bending rules when it suits and weaponizing access to vast markets are now standard practice on both sides.
Still, Xi’s presence stood in stark contrast to Trump’s absence. Face time, as any good leader knows, is essential for relationship-building. Xi’s diplomacy rests on the idea that China represents a “non-Western form of modernization,” said Joseph Torigian, an associate professor at the American University School of International Service in Washington.
“China will try to make inroads even with countries that don’t make a total break with Washington,” he said.
Torigian, the author of The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun (習仲勳), Father of Xi Jinping, added that Xi’s aim is to build a more multipolar order, one in which Western liberal democracy is not seen as inevitable.
That approach allows him to engage comfortably with the US’ allies and adversaries, something he has done repeatedly in recent months. At APEC, he told Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi that conflicts should not define their ties. With Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, he opened the door to a reset, after years of a deep freeze over trade and detentions of Canadian citizens. On his first visit to South Korea in 11 years, Xi described the nations as inseparable neighbors. Beijing has had difficult relations with each of these countries in the past, yet the message was consistent: China is willing to cooperate.
The meetings fit a clear pattern of Xi promoting China as the region’s stable anchor. In September, he hosted important allies, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, at a military parade in Beijing. At the Shanghai Cooperation Summit in Tianjin, China, he met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other global south leaders.
The number of foreign leaders visiting China surged last year, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Since 2023, 74 percent of visiting heads of state have been from the global south, including Indonesia, Pakistan and South Africa.
Still, China’s aggression in the South China Sea is unsettling neighbors, and its claims to the disputed Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台列嶼) — known as the Senkaku Islands in Japan — have repeatedly stoked tensions between Beijing and Tokyo. Concerns over Beijing’s muscular behavior in the Taiwan Strait are also mounting. For Washington, the antidote is simple: Show up. Recent efforts to secure rare earth supply chains through new alliances are a good start. Trump’s agreements with Japan, Thailand, Australia and Malaysia are a display of his blunt force deal-making. Meanwhile, the G7 plan for a broader critical-mineral global production pact could become a useful model for how to counter China’s dominance.
Trump returned to Washington with what he wanted: A de-escalation with Beijing, and a “12 out of 10” review of his own performance. He can claim that US interests were advanced — but only in the short term.
For Xi, the pause in trade hostilities with the US buys time and maintains leverage. Ultimately, when the pomp faded, he was still in the room. That is the image that will last.
Karishma Vaswani is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia politics with a special focus on China. Previously, she was the BBC’s lead Asia presenter and worked for the BBC across Asia and South Asia for two decades. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has offered Taiwan a paradoxical mix of reassurance and risk. Trump’s visceral hostility toward China could reinforce deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Yet his disdain for alliances and penchant for transactional bargaining threaten to erode what Taiwan needs most: a reliable US commitment. Taiwan’s security depends less on US power than on US reliability, but Trump is undermining the latter. Deterrence without credibility is a hollow shield. Trump’s China policy in his second term has oscillated wildly between confrontation and conciliation. One day, he threatens Beijing with “massive” tariffs and calls China America’s “greatest geopolitical
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made the astonishing assertion during an interview with Germany’s Deutsche Welle, published on Friday last week, that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a dictator. She also essentially absolved Putin of blame for initiating the war in Ukraine. Commentators have since listed the reasons that Cheng’s assertion was not only absurd, but bordered on dangerous. Her claim is certainly absurd to the extent that there is no need to discuss the substance of it: It would be far more useful to assess what drove her to make the point and stick so
The central bank has launched a redesign of the New Taiwan dollar banknotes, prompting questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — “Are we not promoting digital payments? Why spend NT$5 billion on a redesign?” Many assume that cash will disappear in the digital age, but they forget that it represents the ultimate trust in the system. Banknotes do not become obsolete, they do not crash, they cannot be frozen and they leave no record of transactions. They remain the cleanest means of exchange in a free society. In a fully digitized world, every purchase, donation and action leaves behind data.
Yesterday, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), once the dominant political party in Taiwan and the historic bearer of Chinese republicanism, officially crowned Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) as its chairwoman. A former advocate for Taiwanese independence turned Beijing-leaning firebrand, Cheng represents the KMT’s latest metamorphosis — not toward modernity, moderation or vision, but toward denial, distortion and decline. In an interview with Deutsche Welle that has now gone viral, Cheng declared with an unsettling confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “not a dictator,” but rather a “democratically elected leader.” She went on to lecture the German journalist that Russia had been “democratized
RSS