Making China Great Again

Prior to his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, on Oct. 30, Donald Trump had been treated like royalty during his Asian tour. The leaders of Malaysia, Japan and South Korea all pretended to like and admire him, showering him with extravagant gifts and promises to promote his Nobel Peace Prize. As he stepped off Air Force One in South Korea, a military band did its best to play “YMCA” for him. But in addition to his meetings with these second-tier countries, the main event in Busan was a meeting on neutral territory with the leader of China, Xi, whose response to Trump was noticeably cooler. 

At the first on-camera meeting between the two presidents, Xi was correct and polite, but returned none of the over-friendly love Trump was offering in his usual brother-dictator routine. An interesting moment came at the end of that first brief encounter, when Trump tried to make up for some borderline insults — “[Xi is] a very tough negotiator. That’s not good!” — by saying affectionately, “We know each other well!,” as if the earlier comments were just good-natured banter among friends.

Xi’s Chinese interpreter translated this drily as, “We have mutual understanding,” and Xi nodded slightly. This was a pattern throughout the Chinese-language version of the meetings. Trump’s joshing and joking — considered the regrettable behavior of a barbarian — was simply removed from the official accounts of the meeting, as it is irrelevant to the political process and considered to be in bad taste. From the Chinese perspective, this improved Trump’s remarks, especially in written reports, making him sound like an honorary member of the Chinese Communist Party who was respectfully addressing Xi with an appropriate level of formality. 

In fact, if you look at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs coverage of this meeting, it is one of an endless series of identical events, with Xi big, solid and impassive, politely shaking hands with foreign leaders. The official Chinese statements about Trump’s visit described an “in-depth exchange of views” and repeated established policy positions, leaving the general impression that Trump’s visit made no difference at all to U.S.-China trade relations or anything else. It could be summed up in the official spokesman’s phrase, “China’s position is consistent and clear.” 

The People’s Daily led its report with, “Trump expressed great respect for President Xi Jinping.” According to Xinhua, “In the face of winds, waves and challenges, Xi said, the two leaders should stay the right course, navigate through the complex landscape and ensure the steady sailing forward of the giant ship of China-U.S. relations.” 

The general tone of Chinese coverage represents a continuity with imperial China, when it was assumed that foreign dignitaries would kowtow and pledge allegiance to the emperor as vassals. When the first British military delegation arrived in 1792, they were expected to abase themselves and offer the undying servitude of King George III to the Son of Heaven. It came as a shock to the eunuchs of the court when they got the Opium Wars instead. Anyone presenting themselves in Beijing today is expected to return to the familiar pattern. 

The Trump administration is off-key in terms of protocol and policy. In a normal U.S.-China summit, careful planning by staffers on both sides would have addressed all the important policy issues affecting the two countries. But Trump arrived without even a functioning government and a staff of sycophants whose job is to agree with him. This only seems to confirm Xi’s slogan, repeated since 2020, that “Time and momentum are on our side,” as well as the discourse among Chinese commentators about “the end of the West.” In the blunt assessment of Jasmine News, a rare Chinese-language independent outlet aimed at readers with VPNs, “America is digging its own grave.” This comports with a survey of recent Chinese media commentary conducted by Rush Doshi of Georgetown University, who describes “an explosion of triumphalism.” 

This triumphalism is also present in Chinese popular culture. The 2021 film, “The Battle at Lake Changjin,” depicts a victory of heroic Chinese troops against the cowardly U.S. Army during the Korean War and is the most expensive movie ever made in China. (It was also popular enough for a sequel.) An opinion poll from September 2024 by the Carter Center and Emory University found that 66% of Chinese adults say that it was in China’s interest to support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This says less about any love for Russia than it does about popular desire to oppose America.

While Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Japan have been hit hard by the Trump tariffs, and were hoping to seduce Trump into making nice, China already has a successful trade policy toward America; it does not need to placate Trump or improvise special events in the hope of making him like them. When Trump threatened import restrictions, China simply countered with threats of export restrictions limiting access to rare earth minerals on which the American computer industry depends.

A deeper reason for the ritualistic style of China’s treatment of its diplomatic relations is the revival of Confucian philosophy among successive Chinese administrations since the 1990s. As the South China Morning Post put it in 2024: “Under President Xi Jinping’s leadership, Confucianism has made a dramatic comeback as the bedrock of imperial Chinese ethics and governance.” This can be seen in the growing number of People’s Daily articles on “Socialist Rule of Law with Chinese Characteristics” as part of Xi Jinping Thought. 

For Confucius, the most important function of government was li, the correct observance of court rituals. Xi has not explicitly adopted li, but it comes under the umbrella term of “virtue,” and since the Tang Dynasty, there has been a synthesis of the two main currents of Chinese political philosophy, Legalism and Confucianism, according to which Confucianist “virtue” is more important than the normal letter of the law. 

The 7th-century Tang legal code added the Ten Abominations, crimes against virtue so serious that no defense was possible under law. These were nearly all crimes of questioning or rebelling against authority. This bias in favor of absolute central power is the main reason for Xi and the CCP’s growing enthusiasm for Confucius, and the justification for all the arrests and executions of corrupt officials.

There is, however, another important ancient Chinese tradition: secret intrigue and conspiracy. The CCP maintains a rigid, ritualistic outward style, but evidence often emerges of underhand schemes not visible in the official version. Often it is not clear where the border between official policy and outright criminality lies. While the central authorities do make serious and visible efforts to curtail the activities of Chinese organized crime — fentanyl manufacture and distribution and the online scams run from Southeast Asia, especially — an investigation by AidData, a research lab at William & Mary, shows that the kind of covert financing typically carried out by Western or Russian criminal networks has been operated by the Chinese authorities on a huge scale for 25 years. 

The Chinese version of anonymous offshore banking by shell companies has two special features: hiding the Chinese origin of the funding, and targeting strategic resources, especially by investing in American companies producing materials and technology with military applications. Chinese investments in U.S. companies amount to over $200 billion since 2000, according to AidData, dwarfing the “predatory lending” they are often accused of in Africa and other low-income countries. The U.K. and the countries of the European Union are next on the list.

A report from The Economist goes even further, suggesting that “underground” Chinese banking is directly involved in financing international criminal networks, specifically by laundering money for drug cartels, North Korean bitcoin artists, Chinese romance scammers and other players of the global underworld in a way that is cheaper and more reliable than the alternatives. The figures suggest that “Chinese networks launder most of the cash spent on illicit drugs in America, a sum estimated to have come to $153 billion in 2017 by the most recent credible study.” Who is responsible for this? Central government? Corrupt regional officials? Who knows. But in a system so totally dominated by the CCP, some degree of involvement by officials is extremely likely. 

This brings us back again to Confucius. Since the earliest Chinese states, corrupt officials have been the problem that just won’t go away. For Confucius, the answer was to develop the social power of “shame” to force officials to spontaneously behave better. Xi has more pragmatically had hundreds of thousands of them arrested, and a few high-profile officials have been executed, with “links to organized crime“ often added to the usual charges of bribery and corruption. But the most corrupt branch of government seems to be the People’s Liberation Army, and although some senior generals disappear without explanation from time to time, even President Xi might hesitate before bringing down that house of cards.

The main component of China’s long-term plan is to become and remain the world’s manufacturing powerhouse. But the yin for that yang is a complementary shadow economy of hidden international finance using that foreign currency — some of it covert central government activity linked to military needs, and some of it outright organized crime — with the line between the two difficult to determine. All of which is to say, “China’s trade policy” is a complex beast. And it could not ask for a more simple-minded antagonist than Donald Trump.