The Chinese president arrived in Washington on Wednesday, where President Trump met him with a rare plane-side greeting, rather than waiting for him at the White House, notes The Associated Press. Xi wasn’t at the airport to meet Trump when he recently visited China.
“Trump is displaying an extraordinary degree of deference to Xi,” Julian Gewirtz, a scholar at Columbia University who’s written on the history of U.S.-China relations, told The New York Times. “He is lavishing honors on China’s leader while downplaying threats to American interests. Beijing could scarcely have asked for a more accommodating host.”
“Trump may laud Xi as a respected friend, as he did when the two men met in Beijing in May,” says The Atlantic. “Yet Xi is no friend of Trump’s. Throughout his 14 years in power, China’s president has acted deliberately and consistently to undermine the United States. His two-day trip to Washington now seems perfectly timed to exploit the weakness of his host and main strategic rival, lately enfeebled by rising domestic prices, plummeting approval ratings, and a costly ongoing war in Iran. This timing makes the spectacle of the purported leader of the free world fawning over a Communist dictator more than just embarrassing.”
Xi’s visit “is getting a much chillier reception on Capitol Hill than at the White House as lawmakers from both parties use the visit to denounce China’s actions on the world stage,” says a separate AP article.
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, took to the Senate floor Tuesday night, offering a list of issues for Trump to raise with Xi, but not before suggesting that Xi shouldn’t have been asked to visit Washington at all.
Wicker said, “Quite frankly, had the White House asked me for advice, I would have suggested the president not invite Xi Jinping to Washington for such a lavish welcome here in the United States of America based on all of the troubling issues we have with President Xi and the Chinese Communist Party.”
Four GOP senators wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, asking that the administration release more than $15 billion in stalled national security assistance for Taiwan, Reuters reports.
China regularly describes the issue of Taiwan, an island 100 miles off China’s coast that it views as its own territory, as its most sensitive and important diplomatic issue. China repeatedly has called for arms sales to stop. The United States is required by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and three other Democratic senators held a press conference Wednesday to warn against the United States weakening export controls for advanced semiconductor chips and equipment. They’re concerned that such exports could erase America’s lead over China in artificial intelligence.
“The Chinese are practical, hardheaded, cynical about the United States,” R. Nicholas Burns, the top U.S. diplomat in Beijing under the Biden administration, told the Times. “They’re going to judge us, I think, by how strong we are and how much we push back when we have to push back. I think the Chinese understand power and deterrence. They’ll be swayed more and affected more by a strong American position than they will by flattery.”
Xi and others in China’s elite believe that the United States is in decline, says The Atlantic. Wang Huning, the Communist Party’s chief theorist and a close adviser to Xi, helped shape this assumption with “America Against America,” a 1991 book about his travels in the United States, in which he portrayed the country as rich and technologically advanced but rotting from within because of its eroding public institutions and decaying cultural values.
Xi “believes that the United States, despite its descent in global politics, still is enormously potentially dangerous,” Kurt Campbell, a former U.S. deputy secretary of state and now the chair of the Asia Group, a consulting firm, told The Atlantic. “Xi is animated by the idea of how to avoid a great-power war and to help ease the United States into a more orderly decline.”
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