There were no major breakthroughs — or disasters — at Donald Trump’s much hyped summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing. Does that make it a success? The Wire China polled four Chinese scholars, three American experts and the relative of a Chinese political prisoner.
U.S. President Donald Trump participates in a welcome ceremony with China's President Xi Jinping, May 14, 2026, in Beijing. Credit: Mark Schiefelbein via AP Images
Meetings between the presidents of China and the U.S. generate much excitement, especially when those presidents are Xi Jinping and Donald Trump and it is the first time in almost a decade that an American president has visited China. Such a big event, the thinking goes, must surely generate big news.
Such expectations are, however, a triumph of hope over experience, as illustrated by Trump and Xi’s May 13-15 summit in Beijing.
An excerpt from a fact sheet on a deal between the U.S
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Not content to run the world’s second most powerful country for a decade, Xi Jinping set about changing everything everywhere all at once. In an excerpt from their new book, Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung examine how Xi seized personal control of China’s foreign policy apparatuses.
The academic talks about whether China’s experience shows there can be such a thing as ‘good environmental authoritarianism’, and what the U.S. could learn from its approach to green policy.
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