Trump-Xi Beijing Meeting Sees China Hawks Take a Back Seat

A lot has happened since U.S. President Donald Trump last visited Beijing nearly a decade ago, but one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

Trump heads to the Chinese capital on Wednesday in a trip expected to be heavy on optics, focused on peaceful coexistence, business deals with big dollar amounts attached, and praise for Chinese President Xi Jinping—all hallmarks of Trump’s last visit in 2017.

In the interregnum between the two trips, however, Trump dialed up the antagonism with a years-long trade war starting in July 2018, a years-long global crusade against Chinese tech company Huawei, an effort to ban Chinese social media platform TikTok, and export controls to prevent Chinese companies from gaining access to advanced U.S. technology.

And, of course, there was the COVID-19 outbreak in China in late 2019—a watershed moment that seemed to cement Trump’s ire toward Beijing.

It was the onset of COVID, in particular the realization that the pandemic had completely tanked the global economy and would most likely ruin the president’s chances of being reelected,” said Liza Tobin, managing director at the geopolitical risk advisory firm Garnaut Global. As a China director at the National Security Council in Trump’s first term, Tobin had a front-row seat to Trump’s hawkish turn. “He blamed Xi Jinping for not containing the pandemic earlier, then decided that this relationship isn’t working and it’s time to decouple,” she added. “And so at that point, he empowered his staff to pursue decoupling policies, and that’s what we did for the rest of the term.”

Trump was right about the reelection part. He was voted out in November 2020, replaced by Democratic President Joe Biden, who came into the White House promising to undo the damage Trump had done to Washington’s global standing. On China policy, however, Biden stayed the course—even ratcheting up many of the technology export controls, introducing new policies such as a ban on Chinese vehicles, and actually signing a TikTok ban into law.

“We recognized over the course of the Trump years that the watchword of engagement had given way to the watchword of competition as a core organizing principle of the U.S.-China relationship,” said Jake Sullivan, who served as national security advisor in the Biden administration and a key architect of its China policy. “We spent the Trump years formulating a strategy that would allow us to compete effectively while also being able to manage the competition effectively,” he added.

As a result, a bipartisan consensus that China is the primary adversary and national security threat to the United States has coalesced in Washington over the past six years, animating Democrats and Republicans alike.

However, it’s not clear that it still animates Trump. Over the past year, the Trump administration has green-lit the sale to China of some advanced semiconductor chips made by tech giant Nvidia (though no chips have actually been sold yet), cut key personnel at the Commerce Department focused on the technology threats posed by China, and dramatically slashed his National Security Council—including firing more than a dozen China hands. He also flipped on TikTok, signing a deal for the social media platform to continue operating in the United States that allows Chinese parent company ByteDance to retain a stake and control of its algorithm.

Trump has also continued to lavish praise on Xi, calling him an “amazing man” in remarks to reporters on Monday and marveling at how he rules China “with a pretty iron fist.” Trump also said (not for the first time) that he would discuss U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan with Xi when they meet, which would break the second of the “Six Assurances” to Taiwan that have defined U.S.-Taiwan relations for decades.

So what explains Trump’s apparent change of heart in his second term? What happened to Trump the China hawk? And what does this more amenable approach portend for Trump’s meeting with Xi later this week? To find out, Foreign Policy spoke to more than a dozen current and former officials, some of whom requested anonymity to share internal administration deliberations, as well as several longtime China watchers. The picture of Trump’s second-term shift on China that emerges is one driven by personality, pragmatism, and priorities.

The biggest difference between China strategy in Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is not restricted to China and has to do with the changes in how Trump governs. The U.S. president has centralized decision-making far more than he did in his first term, prizing loyalty over expertise and trusting only a tight circle of advisors—chief among them his real estate developer friend Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who have been at the center of negotiations to end three separate wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and Iran.

China is the one area where Witkoff and Kushner have not been involved, however, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent taking the lead and advocating “stability” and “equilibrium” between the world’s two largest economies. “We have to derisk but not decouple,” he told the Wall Street Journal last month.

But voices on China other than Trump’s own have far less room to breathe in his second administration. “In the first term, the president oversaw a fairly bottom-up policy process where he had people all across his administration and the White House who were proposing all kinds of ideas relating to China across the full spectrum of competition,” said David Feith, who worked on China policy in the State Department during Trump’s first term and served on the National Security Council in Trump’s second term until April of last year. “He’s running the administration in the second term differently than in his first,” said Feith. “I think that’s true overall, and it’s true with respect to China.”

While Trump still has some traditional China hawks at senior levels of his administration, they have been largely sidelined and silenced. “One illustration of how the president in the second term is pursuing China differently than in the first is that the president’s senior foreign-policy and national security advisor is a guy, Marco Rubio, who was probably Washington’s most articulate, full-spectrum China hawk for the last decade but is basically working China in this administration on a very limited and selective and almost mute basis,” one former Trump administration official said. “Rubio is both very serious and thoughtful on China and very serious about being the national security advisor and secretary of state that Trump wants and expects,” they added. “He’s got to be the aide that the president wants.”

More than ever, especially on China, Trump’s administration takes its cues directly from Trump himself. “The President sets foreign policy, and his administration implements. The incredible working and personal relationships between the members of the team is a testament to the President’s ability to manage and lead. And the historic results are undeniable,” State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott told Foreign Policy. “Secretary Rubio is honored to be part of President Trump’s administration as we work for a safer, stronger, and more prosperous America.”

Another factor driving Trump’s softer approach has been Beijing’s willingness to punch back at Washington and its ability to cause real pain.

Trump began his second term much as he ended his first, imposing a 10 percent tariff on Chinese goods in February 2025 that he subsequently increased multiple times and eventually ratcheted up to 145 percent.

This time, however, China struck back hard, imposing export controls in April on several rare earth minerals whose global production it dominates that are critical inputs in several technology and military applications that the United States relies on. The aggressive move led almost immediately to a series of talks culminating in an agreement in June that saw the United States roll back some export controls in exchange for Beijing resuming licenses of those critical minerals. Around four months later, Trump’s first in-person meeting with Xi of his second term, in Busan, South Korea, yielded a more expansive trade truce.

“The fact is that the administration was mostly caught by surprise when Beijing responded to the Liberation Day tariffs with the aggressive critical minerals card,” the former Trump administration official said. “That generated, in the thinking of the president and many people around him, a lot of concern and a sense that we need to proceed with China much more cautiously—and that explains a lot about the last year.”

The Trump administration is now increasingly focused on maintaining stability with China while focusing on diversifying its own supply chains, said U.S. Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Jacob Helberg. Helberg oversees the Trump administration’s Pax Silica initiative, a U.S.-led international collective aimed at securing tech supply chains—including critical minerals—that now counts 15 countries as its members, including Norway, Finland, Australia, Israel, India, Japan, and the Philippines.

Helberg described China’s weaponization of rare earths as an “unprecedented watershed” not just for the United States but for countries around the world. “The administration was clear that it was totally unacceptable, and obviously it caused a lot of follow-up discussions through which we were able to find a much better equilibrium, which led to the Busan agreement, and now the status quo is stable,” he added.

Helberg downplayed the notion that those shifts represent a major policy departure for Trump. “People in the press love to over-read and try to speculate the psychology of leaders as well as what’s going on in the heads of heads of state,” he said. “Right now, with everything going on in the world, having stability in the two largest economies in the world is in the world’s interests. We can achieve political stability while competing peacefully economically—the president’s been totally clear about that, and I don’t think there’s any contradiction in any of it.”

Trump’s view has also been bolstered by a broader recognition of China as a “near-peer,” as outlined in Trump’s national security strategy released in December. That strategy emphasizes a retreat from Washington trying to do everything, everywhere, all at once and instead prioritizes spheres of influence in its own hemisphere—illustrated by Trump’s decision to invade Venezuela at the start of this year and his reported efforts to shepherd regime change in Cuba.

“The best way to understand the president’s foreign policy in general is that he picks winnable fights,” said Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., who previously served as a U.S.-China advisor to the State Department during the Biden administration. “China is not legible to this administration as a winnable fight.”

Yet Trump also heads to Beijing bogged down by another regime change effort in the Middle East, with the war on Iran that he launched more than two months ago now hinging on a fragile cease-fire. Keeping the peace with China thus becomes imperative. And just as he used his 2017 visit to push Xi to make North Korea give up its nuclear weapons program, Trump is now expected to lean on Xi to pressure another Chinese ally: Iran is one of China’s top oil suppliers and international partners, and Trump has repeatedly urged Beijing to do more to bring Iran to the negotiating table.

“President Trump, when you go to China, realize that the person you’re talking to is propping up Russia and Iran,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said while questioning U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—who will travel to China with Trump—during a Senate hearing on Tuesday, adding that “of all the countries on the planet, China could have the most influence of ending this war if they chose to.”

Beyond Iran, for Trump, the emphasis during this week’s summit will be on trying to further formalize the China equilibrium with a heavy dose of dealmaking. Over a dozen U.S. business executives will accompany Trump to China, including Apple CEO Tim Cook and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, both of whose businesses have extensive links to China, and big announcements on Chinese purchases of Boeing jets and U.S. agricultural products are expected.

Trump “actually does come at this with a businessman’s point of view,” said Graham Allison, a professor of government and the founding dean at the Harvard Kennedy School. “It’s basically that we’re rivals, but we are very highly interdependent and so the interdependence should be mutually beneficial.”

Allison said he doesn’t expect Trump or Xi to use words like “rapprochement” or “detente,” but they “might call this a new partnership or the beginning of a beautiful partnership.”

How long that partnership is operationalized remains to be seen—some hawkish shoots have begun to poke out from the Trump administration in the last several weeks, including secondary sanctions on Chinese refiners processing Iranian oil and a White House memo in late April accusing China of “systematically extracting and copying the innovations of American industry” in training Chinese AI models such as DeepSeek.

“A few months ago, no one was allowed to even breathe the word ‘China.’ No one was even allowed to publicly criticize China because of the truce, and that’s clearly no longer the case,” Tobin said. “They’re now involved in more of the standard national security actions while still holding off from anything major that would shatter the truce.”

China will likely aim to keep that caution going, Tobin added—in part by seeking to schedule further summits between Trump and Xi. The Chinese leader is already expected to visit Washington later this year, and additional meetings between the two leaders may be in the offing.

“I think the Chinese would consider it a success if they could get President Trump locked into a series of these dialogues, because they’ve seen how much he prioritizes having these face-to-face meetings with other leaders, and that he will then kind of tame his bureaucracy in the lead-up to these summits,” she said. “They would find it successful if they just get a commitment to more meetings and then maybe put some psychological constraint on the Trump team to keep holding off on new export controls, new tariffs, new investment controls, and all that.”