At Summit, Xi Sought to Tilt Trump’s Stance on America’s Place in Asia

 

News Analysis

At Summit, Xi Sought to Tilt Trump’s Stance on America’s Place in Asia

 

In his talks with President Trump, the Chinese leader used praise, warnings and wartime history to challenge American support for Taiwan and Japan.

 

Chris Buckley David Pierson

By Chris Buckley and David Pierson

Sept. 26, 2026

Updated 10:11 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/world/asia/summit-xi-trump-taiwan-japan.html

 

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is not known for lightheartedness. Yet during his White House summit with President Trump, he sometimes smiled and even laughed, projecting a warmth unusual for a meeting between superpower rivals.

 

Behind the show of geniality, Mr. Xi’s carefully chosen words revealed a cooler calculus: an effort to steer Mr. Trump toward Beijing’s positions on Taiwan, Japan and the broader security order in Asia.

 

On Taiwan, Mr. Xi pressed Mr. Trump to limit American support for the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its territory. On Japan, Mr. Xi invoked history to portray Tokyo, an American ally, as a resurgent military threat, while reminding the president that China and the United States had once fought on the same side.

 

Mr. Xi appeared to be testing for opportunities to shape Mr. Trump’s views, rather than hoping for a decisive breakthrough, Matt Pottinger, who served as a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Trump in his first term as president, said in an interview. Mr. Xi and Mr. Trump have met three times since October last year, and they may meet two more times by the end of this year.

 

“Xi sees frequent meetings with his American counterpart as an opportunity to probe for weaknesses in the U.S. positions,” said Mr. Pottinger, now the chairman of the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

 

Outwardly, the summit between Mr. Xi and Mr. Trump achieved little.

 

China and the United States agreed to extend their truce in the trade war, but only by two months. The leaders discussed the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine but announced no apparent advances on ending either conflict. They toasted each other, and spoke loftily of partnership and stability in relations, yet announced no concrete agreements on the most contentious of issues: the trade imbalance, technology restrictions and Taiwan.

 

The trip was certainly a propaganda boost for Mr. Xi, who has sought to cast himself as an equal to Mr. Trump on the world stage.

 

Coverage of the summit was splashed across the front page of the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, with images of Mr. Xi being honored at the White House with a military flyover and being greeted by Mr. Trump at Joint Base Andrews. A top trending hashtag on Chinese social media was about how rare it was for an American president to receive a world leader on the tarmac.

 

“This is historic validation of China’s strength. It’s seen as a point of arrival and adds to Xi Jinping’s effort to portray China as an equal partner, which has been the brass ring of Chinese foreign policy” for decades, said Evan Medeiros, a professor of Asian studies at Georgetown University who was senior Asia director on the National Security Council under President Barack Obama.

 

The summit served Mr. Xi’s purposes in a more subtle but important way. He used verbal finesse to suggest that Mr. Trump was sympathetic to Beijing’s positions — even if members of Mr. Trump’s own administration disagree with them.

 

Most notably, Mr. Xi appeared to imply that Mr. Trump had shifted closer to Beijing’s views on Taiwan, including that the island’s government is scheming for independence. Continued stability in relations between China and the United States, he indicated, rested on Mr. Trump heeding Chinese positions.

 

“I hope that the United States adheres to the correct position of opposing ‘Taiwan independence’ and handles the Taiwan issue prudently,” Mr. Xi said in his meeting with Mr. Trump on Thursday, according to an official summary issued by Chinese news outlets. That approach would, Mr. Xi said, “lay a solid foundation for U.S.-China strategic cooperation and the development of bilateral relations.”

 

Successive U.S. administrations have said they do not support outright Taiwanese independence. But U.S. presidents have generally rejected Chinese calls for Washington to declare that it flatly “opposes” independence. Such a shift, experts say, could suggest that the United States believes that Taiwan’s policies, and not Beijing’s threat of forcible unification, are the primary source of cross-strait tensions.

 

Mr. Xi’s use of the word “adhere” (“jianchi” in Chinese) appeared intended to create the impression that “Beijing believes Trump has already absorbed some of its red lines on Taiwan,” said Craig Singleton, a China Program senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Beijing is steadily wrapping its preferred language around the summit.”

 

The official Chinese summary of Mr. Xi’s remarks did not go into specifics, but the implied warning was clear, several experts said. If Mr. Trump went ahead and approved a proposal to sell $14 billion worth of weapons to Taiwan, he could damage or even undo the fragile détente between Beijing and Washington.

 

The package includes missiles, anti-drone equipment and air-defense systems. It would follow a separate $11 billion package Mr. Trump approved late last year. After his last summit with Mr. Xi in Beijing in May, though, Mr. Trump said that the arms sales were a “very good negotiating chip” with China. He has since held off on approving the new package, raising unease in Taiwan and across Asia about how far he could go in subordinating U.S. security commitments to better ties with China.

 

“What is important is in practice the U.S. should stop selling arms to Taiwan and be very careful in the dealing with Taiwan,” said Wu Xinbo, an American studies scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai who advises China’s Foreign Ministry.

 

Many experts expect Mr. Trump to eventually sign off on more arms sales, however. China could retaliate with military intimidation of Taiwan or economic punishment of the United States, such as further restrictions of rare earth exports to U.S. companies.

 

Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Mr. Xi’s comments “distorted the facts” in an effort to support Beijing’s claim over the island.

 

Ali Wyne, a senior researcher on U.S.-China ties at the International Crisis Group, said Mr. Xi recognizes that Mr. Trump was “not going to dwell on semantic considerations, especially if he can frame them as part of an appeal to Trump’s ego.”

 

For that, Mr. Xi leaned into a familiar maritime metaphor that appealed to Mr. Trump’s preference for leader-to-leader diplomacy. “I am ready to work with you to steer the giant ship of the China-U.S. relationship on a steady course,” Mr. Xi told Mr. Trump.

 

Mr. Trump said on Friday that he would attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China, in November, and that Mr. Xi would attend the Group of 20 summit in Florida in December.

 

Mr. Xi also used his time to try to drive a wedge between Washington and one of its stalwart allies in Asia — Japan.

 

He reminded Mr. Trump that the United States and China fought together against a common Japanese enemy during World War II. He described Imperial Japan as “fascist” and “militarist” aggressors, reviving an image of Japan as an “enemy state” that cannot be trusted on the global stage.

 

His remarks were in line with a monthslong effort by Beijing to punish Japan over comments Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi made in defense of Taiwan in November.

 

“The message is, ‘They are the bad guys, and we are the good guys that are trying to change the world order, and the Americans should cooperate with us,’” said Akio Takahara, a visiting professor at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University who specializes in Chinese politics.

 

The risk for Japan, he said, is that Mr. Xi’s narrative could gain traction if repeated enough times.

 

Ms. Takaichi told reporters in Tokyo on Friday that Japan had achieved “genuine reconciliation” with the United States and they now had a “relationship of mutual trust as allies bound by very strong bonds.”

 

Javier C. Hernández contributed reporting from Tokyo, and Xinyun Wu from Taipei.

 

Chris Buckley, the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues.

 

David Pierson covers Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.