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TikTok, trade and tariffs: What is Trump playing at with China? 

How will the two most powerful leaders in the world get on and do business? If their past face-to-face meetings are anything to go by, it’s not going to be easy, writes Michael Sheridan

Friday 24 January 2025 14:27 EST
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Donald Trump speaks out about his relationship with Putin and Xi Jinping

How well do Donald Trump and Xi Jinping get on? The world’s most important relationship is between America and China. And it is in the hands of two powerful men in their seventies who are a study in contrasts.

Their deeds will shape events for the next four years, from TikTok to trade, tariffs, technology, war and peace.

Xi is a Marxist trained in party discipline, immune to charm, hyper-cautious, set on aims fixed in conclaves behind the vermilion walls of Beijing and not a man to negotiate on the fly. Trump is, well, Trump.

“I like President Xi very much,” said the 47th president this week. “I’ve always liked him. We always had a very good relationship. It was very strained with Covid coming out of Wuhan. Obviously, that strained it.”

Yet the president went on to add words that might dismay some China “hawks” in his cabinet: “We always had a great relationship, I would say, and we look forward to doing very well with China and getting along with China.”

The Chinese Communist leader’s private thoughts on the former New York property developer have not been vouchsafed to the world.

The duo have things in common. Both were children of privilege: Xi was born into power and Trump into wealth. Both were the sons of overbearing fathers and grew up among rival siblings. But any childhood similarities end there.

‘While the young Trump was hitting the party scene in Manhattan, his Chinese opponent was slowly climbing out of misery to get onto the ladder of power’
‘While the young Trump was hitting the party scene in Manhattan, his Chinese opponent was slowly climbing out of misery to get onto the ladder of power’ (AFP via Getty Images)

Xi’s father was purged, the family disgraced and Xi himself was beaten, brutalised, imprisoned and exiled as a young teenager to a far-off village where he toiled in the fields, lived in a cave and survived on a peasant diet.

While the young Trump was hitting the party scene in Manhattan, his Chinese opponent was slowly climbing out of misery to get onto the ladder of power – winning a place at college, working for China’s defence supremo and then doing years of gruel in the provinces on his rise to power.

Chinese leaders are schooled in “eating bitterness,” as Xi himself has put it. They are frankly bemused to meet Western politicians who have had it easy.

When Barack Obama went to Beijing for the first time, the Politburo found it hard to take seriously a one-term senator from Illinois with no previous experience of high office. Mistake. It was Obama – not Trump – who pivoted American policy to confront China. He just didn’t bluster about it.

Xi might have built back better with Joe Biden. The two men met at least eight times between 2011 and 2023. But it was Biden who went back to Washington full of foreboding after Xi told him that the lesson he learned from Chinese history was “never to make concessions”.

That was not very promising for the grandmaster of the art of the deal, Donald Trump, when the two engaged during the first Trump presidency. He turned on the hustle and the full Mar-a-Lago treatment only to find that it didn’t work.

One source told me that when the two sat down for cocktails – Trump is a teetotaller but Xi likes a drink – nothing broke the ice. Xi had in tow his expert on America, an ideologue called Wang Huning, who had briefed him to beware of such foreign tricks.

Sure enough, when Trump repaid the visit, a photograph of the first couples in the Forbidden City showed them as stiff as waxworks, with Melania Trump looking as if she desperately wished to be somewhere else.

The serious lesson – this time round – is that Xi doesn’t do personal stuff and he doesn’t cave in. But he does respect power and he will adjust his aims.

On TikTok, Trump has already said a deal can be done and a billionaire investor in its parent company, Bill Ford of Atlantic Capital, told the Chinese business magazine Caixin at the World Economic Forum in Davos that “it will happen”.

On tariffs, Trump said he would “rather not” hit China with sky-high tariffs; a statement taken by financial commentators in the Chinese media to mean this is an opening gambit.

War and peace will be harder stuff. Yet the American president has given a glimpse of some of the most secret strategic talks of his last term on nuclear arms.

“We’d like to see denuclearisation. In fact, with President Putin, prior to an election result, which was, frankly, ridiculous, we were talking about denuclearisation of our two countries, and China would have come along,” he said.

Who knew? A pile of hawkish American reports have warned that Xi is rapidly building up China’s atomic arsenal. The US president confirmed this but seemed to hold out the prospect of a grand bargain – Nobel Prizes for all.

Trump may be famously indiscreet but sometimes his discourse is not as spontaneous as his followers may think. In Beijing and Moscow, they are listening to every word.

Michael Sheridan, longtime foreign correspondent and diplomatic editor of The Independent, is the author of ‘The Red Emperor’ published by Headline Press at £25

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