When Britain sent its first formal diplomatic mission to China in 1793, one of the participants from London, Peter Auber, remarked that the group had been “received with the utmost politeness, treated with the utmost hospitality, watched with the utmost vigilance and dismissed with the utmost civility”.
The mission, which aimed to open trade and establish a permanent British embassy in Beijing, involved great pomp – but it led to no tangible return. Auber’s quote came back to me as I watched Donald Trump’s two-day state visit to China unfold.
The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, opened the summit by greeting his American counterpart with warm words. The relationship between their two countries, he stated, was the “most consequential in the world”. Xi added that making America great again, a reference to Trump’s political slogan, was compatible with Chinese progress.
Trump was equally effusive in his praise of Xi. Writing on social media during his flight to Beijing, he stated that the Chinese president was “respected by all”. And when the two delegations sat down for direct talks, Trump told Xi: “You’re a great leader.”
But what did this visit actually achieve, beyond the diplomatic words and mutual flattery?
One of Trump’s perennial aims in his first and second spells in the White House has been to correct the trade imbalance between the two powers. Figures from 2025 show that while the US sold US$106 billion (£79 billion) of goods to China, it bought products worth US$308 billion from Chinese exporters – a trade deficit of around US$200 billion.
On Trump’s previous visit to China in 2017, soya beans were the thing Beijing agreed to buy more of from the US. This time around, the sole big ticket item was aircraft.
On May 14, Trump announced that China had agreed to order 200 Boeing jets. Yet Boeing’s stock fell 4% immediately after the announcement, because the order was lower than many analysts had expected.
Trump also said that China had, in principle, agreed to buy crude oil from the US.
However, in terms of something significant for the CEOs of major tech companies accompanying Trump to Beijing, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Apple’s Tim Cook, it seems there was no major breakthrough.
China’s strategy of developing its own technology and capacity in this area is well-known, with the government’s recent 15th five-year plan setting out its commitment to innovation, and to its own indigenous companies.
Great-power cooperation
A more significant outcome from the visit came in the less tangible space of geopolitical management and great-power cooperation. At the summit, Xi said clearly that the world relies on China and the US being able to engage with each other pragmatically, even if they don’t see eye to eye.
Comments made on Taiwan, in particular, were seen as underlining the red lines for each side. Xi repeated his demand for American non-interference, a coded warning about US arms sales to the island, which Beijing regards as a breakaway province. Trump later told reporters he had not yet decided whether a major US sale of weapons to Taiwan could move forward.
But in their talks with Chinese officials, the US delegation appear to have stuck largely to policy lines in place since the 1970s – that this issue has to be sorted out peacefully, with agreement from both Taiwan and China.
In view of the other turbulence in the world at the moment, sticking as far as possible to the status quo on this issue, while unexciting, can be described as a positive.
Regarding that turbulence, Trump said Xi had offered to help the US in the Iran conflict – but how this might work out in practice is another matter. China is unlikely to want to play a heavy mediation role, because of the potential to be sucked into the perpetual problems the region seems to present to anyone getting more involved there.
What China wants is a long-term truce that means both Tehran and Washington can claim to have emerged from the Iran war as the winner – despite there being no final decisive outcome. China definitely does not want the conflict to continue indefinitely, given its disruptive economic impact – hence the offer of some kind of help.
History will probably judge Trump’s visit as one more landmark along the road to a world in which China has greater prominence, but still accords the US respect and acceptance of its current economic and military primacy. Trump may have left empty-handed – but in diplomacy, nothing happening is sometimes a good thing.
That the two leaders got on, did not clash and agreed to continue the conversation might not seem a great outcome. But in this turbulent world, it still counts as a plus.
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