Xi’s recent visit to Washington was merely a tactical step rather than a genuine reconciliation.
Both fully aware that the perception of China as an existential threat to America is the common denominator between running mates, regardless of their political affiliation, and between Democrats and Republicans, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump nevertheless decided to meet in Washington, at the very moment when the 81st UN General Assembly was being held in New York.
In reality, the handshake exchanged Thursday on the North Portico of the White House, between a beaming Donald Trump and an impassive Xi Jinping, will remain the most ambiguous image of Sino-American diplomacy this decade. For behind the former’s verbal exuberance, who spoke of a “great friendship” built on “mutual respect,” and the latter’s calculated restraint, who preferred to speak of “peaceful coexistence,” lies a far more subtle drama than a simple bilateral reconciliation. This first state visit by Xi to Washington in over a decade is not a thaw. It is a tactical adjustment between two powers that have learned to manage, rather than resolve, an antagonism that is now multidimensional – at first glance, commercial, technological, military, and ideological.
The Theatre of Cordiality
Contemporary diplomacy, particularly under Trump, operates according to a visual grammar where protocol itself becomes the argument. The lavish displays – gala dinners bringing together the biggest names in American tech, the promise of a pair of pandas donated to the Atlanta Zoo, a joint visit to the National Archives – fall under the umbrella of what is known as “performance diplomacy.” That is to say, a system where projected emotion matters as much as, if not more than, the negotiated content. Nothing is accidental. Each symbolic gesture serves a distinct domestic narrative for each of the two leaders, without either yielding on substance. It is precisely this dissociation between the aesthetics of reconciliation and the persistence of structural disagreements that constitutes the hallmark of the Trump-XI era: a transactional pragmatism draped in the lexicon of personal friendship that cannot obscure the extent of the underlying disputes.
Trade war and economic decoupling
The first and oldest front remains trade. Since 2018, the two economies have clashed through tariffs, in an escalation that neither negotiated truces nor successive summits have ever fully defused. The vocabulary has changed. The term “trade war” is no longer used; instead, “de- risking ” is employed. This diplomatic neologism is intended to soften an unchanged reality: the American desire to reduce its dependence on Chinese supply chains in sectors deemed critical, such as pharmaceuticals, batteries, and strategic minerals. Beijing, for its part, has responded with a deliberate policy of technological self-sufficiency, while maintaining a formidable lever: China’s near-total control over the refining of rare earth elements, essential for electronics, defense, and renewable energy, which Beijing has repeatedly exploited through export restrictions.
Added to this is the never-resolved question of the supposed undervaluation of the yuan and China’s ambitions for the gradual dedollarization of international trade, an approach that Beijing is patiently pursuing through its bilateral agreements in local currencies, without any spectacular break with the dollar being credible at present.
The technological duopoly
The most revealing aspect of this visit, however, is not protocol-related but industrial. By inviting the leaders of Amazon, Meta, Apple, Google, Nvidia , Tesla, and OpenAI to its table, Washington signaled where the true center of gravity of the bilateral relationship now lies: artificial intelligence and the semiconductors that make it possible. American restrictions on the export of advanced chips, the entity regime Lists targeting Chinese champions, and Beijing’s countermeasures on critical minerals, paint a picture of a subtle but all-out confrontation for the supremacy of disruptive technologies. It is here that the summit’s most instructive paradox emerges: Xi Jinping advocated for AI development under “human control,” while Trump announced his intention to maintain the regulatory status quo, a position he also attributes to Beijing.
This convergence is not accidental: it betrays a common, almost collusive interest in delaying any restrictive governance architecture that would constrain the respective national industries, even as each side seeks to sabotage the other’s technological advance through more direct means: export control, industrial espionage, cyberattacks attributed to state groups.
This is a textbook case of what game theory calls a non-cooperative local positive sum equilibrium: each pursues their own interest, but the aggregate result looks, from the outside, like an agreement.
Taiwan and the South China Sea
No Sino-American summit, however, could erase the most rigid fault line in the matter: Taiwan. Xi has reaffirmed his red lines with a consistency bordering on ritual, without Trump attempting to engage him on this slippery slope just weeks before domestic elections. This strategic omission is not an oversight but a deliberate choice: addressing Taiwan would mean reopening a dispute that neither side has an interest in publicly reviving.
The same cautious silence surrounds the South China Sea, where incidents between Chinese coast guards and Philippine, Vietnamese or American ships have multiplied without ever escalating, and where Washington continues to rely on its network of regional alliances – AUKUS, Quad, bilateral agreements with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines – to contain the expansion of the Chinese navy.
Added to this is a less visible but equally structuring race: that of hypersonic weapons, space capabilities and cyber-arsenals , areas in which the two powers are investing massively without ever publicly admitting it as an arms race.
Finally, the Iranian issue became a backdrop to the summit: Beijing, Tehran’s de facto ally and the largest buyer of its oil despite US sanctions, seized the opportunity to call for a negotiated resolution to the conflict. This was a discreet way of exerting influence on a matter in which its energy interests are directly involved.
The rivalry of values and influence
Beyond trade and arms, the Sino-American rivalry also plays out in the more diffuse arena of norms and influence. Washington continues to denounce the human rights situation in Xinjiang and the erosion of freedoms in Hong Kong, while Beijing systematically dismisses these criticisms as interference in its internal affairs.
The battle over personal data and digital sovereignty – illustrated by the TikTok saga in the United States – reflects a mutual distrust of the use of technological platforms as vectors for espionage or propaganda.
In terms of global infrastructure, China’s Belt and Road Initiative continues to develop Africa, Central Asia and Latin America, in direct competition with Western counter-proposals from the G7, which have never been equipped with comparable resources.
Finally, this normative rivalry extends into multilateral forums – the World Trade Organization, international financial institutions, the UN Security Council – where each power seeks to impose its vision of an international order more favorable to its interests, without either openly renouncing the existing multilateral framework.
Domestic politics as a hidden driving force
No analysis of this summit would be complete without examining its domestic manipulation. Trump orchestrated this meeting just weeks before midterm elections that are not going well for his party, in a climate where voters accuse him of neglecting everyday economic difficulties in favor of costly foreign commitments. Projecting a conciliatory relationship with the established second-largest economy in the world, and de facto first, even at the risk of being criticized for being too lenient towards an authoritarian regime, is a calculated gamble to rehabilitate his image.
For Xi, the stakes are symmetrical but reversed: consolidating a “stable” relationship offers Beijing the necessary respite to complete its technological and industrial upgrade, without concessions on sovereignty issues which it considers non-negotiable.
The two leaders are thus practicing a form of domestic political diplomacy disguised as state diplomacy. A phenomenon described as a “two-level game“, in which the international agreement is merely an extension of a strictly domestic electoral or legitimizing calculation.
Likely trajectories
What does this visit foreshadow for the coming year? Several scenarios are emerging, on each of the fronts examined.
On the commercial front, a superficial stabilization, punctuated by agricultural or industrial announcements calibrated for the American electorate, without any substantive revision of structural tariffs or abandonment of cross-technology restrictions.
On the military front, there is an increasingly ritualized management of the Taiwan issue and the South China Sea, where the two capitals tacitly agree to postpone the deadline for a direct confrontation, each calculating that time is on its side.
From a normative point of view, the competition for influence – Silk Roads versus Western initiatives, rival models of digital governance – will continue to expand without ever giving rise to an open rupture.
This state visit will thus remain less a turning point than a revealing snapshot: that of two powers that have traded frontal confrontation for a choreographed management of a now total antagonism, where proclaimed friendship serves as a rhetorical anesthetic to a rivalry that neither intends to abandon.
Diplomatic history will remember that this summit was less a milestone of reconciliation than an exercise in risk management, where each capital measured, with a smile on its face, how far the other was prepared to concede without ever giving up anything essential.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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