Managing Competition: The New Logic of US–China Summitry

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The most important outcome of Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington may not be any individual agreement. It may be a new way in which the United States and China are learning to manage a relationship that neither side expects to resolve.

Observers often approach a Xi–Trump summit as if it were primarily a meeting between heads of government: leaders are expected to negotiate tariffs, technology restrictions, arms sales, or purchases and emerge with detailed agreements. Increasingly, that is the wrong model.

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are meeting more as heads of state. Their role is becoming one of setting political boundaries, deciding the broad direction of the relationship, and identifying when they will meet again. Officials below them then spend the intervening months bargaining over the details of implementation. Issues that cannot be settled at the working level can be returned to the presidents at the next summit.

The elaborate state ceremony in Washington reinforced this shift. But more important than the pageantry was the agreement that the two countries would support each other’s APEC and G20 summits, with both presidents intending to attend. A summit can therefore end without resolving every dispute as long as another political checkpoint is already visible on the calendar.

This emerging mechanism does not mean Washington and Beijing now understand strategic stability in the same way. After the May summit, the White House said the two countries should build “a constructive relationship of strategic stability on the basis of fairness and reciprocity.” This time in Washington, the formulation became “respect, fairness, and reciprocity.” The Chinese-language formulation, however, uses 对等, or duideng, which is not a direct translation of ‘reciprocity’. Beijing’s subsequent explanation is revealing: it defines duideng partly in terms of sovereign equality, insisting that the two countries have no hierarchical relationship and that neither should dominate the other.

Washington’s emphasis on ‘reciprocity’ carries a different political instinct. Reciprocity asks whether access, concessions, obligations, and benefits are being exchanged symmetrically. It does not necessarily imply that the parties possess equal strategic status. A major power can demand reciprocity from a much smaller state.

That distinction helps explain another conspicuous feature of the summit. Xi again invoked the ‘Thucydides Trap’, arguing that rising and the status-quo powers do not have to fall into conflict. Trump did not publicly embrace that framework.

The difference is substantive. Beijing’s preferred narrative implicitly asks Washington to accept China as a peer whose rise should not be treated as a threat to be defeated. Many in Washington reject the premise that China’s continued rise toward strategic parity, much less the displacement of the United States, is inevitable or should be accommodated. The White House’s own post-summit fact sheet, immediately after recalling US–Chinese cooperation during World War II, emphasized that American forward military presence has underwritten the Indo-Pacific order since then.

The two sides are therefore converging on the need for stability without agreeing on the hierarchy within that stability.

Trade provides a good example of how the new summit mechanism may work. The two-month extension of the existing truce should not necessarily be read as a decision that the next truce will last only two months. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explicitly said the extension gives both sides additional time to pursue a potentially larger agreement. Beijing has similarly described the extension as creating space to evaluate implementation and determine how negotiations should proceed.

In other words, January 10, the current expiration date of the extended trade truce, may be less an endpoint than a bridge. The negotiators now have another window to bargain, while the APEC and G20 meetings create additional opportunities for the two presidents to decide how long the next arrangement should last and what conditions should accompany it.

This does not mean another trade confrontation has become impossible. Washington’s Section 301 investigation into structural excess capacity remains unresolved, and reports before the summit indicated that additional tariffs were still being considered. China retains leverage of its own through rare earths and critical-mineral supply chains. The underlying restraint comes partly from a simple recognition: both sides now possess tools capable of imposing substantial costs on the other.

Taiwan produced an even more interesting example of how Beijing is adapting to Trump’s diplomatic style. After the May summit, Trump described Xi’s comments on Taiwan unusually plainly: “I heard him out.” He immediately added that he had made no comment and no commitment. Beijing could therefore reasonably anticipate that Trump might again listen without directly contesting Xi’s characterization of the issue.

This time, Xi directly stated that he hoped the United States would “adhere to the correct position of opposing ‘Taiwan independence’.” The wording was clever. Washington’s longstanding formulation has generally been that it does not support Taiwan independence, which is not identical to Beijing’s preferred language of actively opposing it. Yet the Chinese wording presented opposition as though it were already an established American position that Washington merely needed to “adhere to.”

Trump did not publicly rebut that formulation during the summit. Washington subsequently stressed that US Taiwan policy had not changed, including its commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act, the three joint communiqués, and the Six Assurances.

This was therefore not a formal American concession. It was closer to a rhetorical manoeuvre in which Beijing used Trump’s preference for listening without engaging every disputed formulation to create the most favourable possible public record.

Trump’s own priorities also matter. He increasingly treats personal diplomacy as part of his political legacy. During Xi’s visit, he personally showed him the new White House helipad and Marine One; his administration also inserted Trump’s preferred term “super intelligence” into its official summit fact sheet, even though Chinese statements continued to use “artificial intelligence.” These are small details, but they illustrate how Trump often seeks visible evidence that an initiative bears his personal imprint.

The emerging US–China system is therefore neither détente nor reconciliation. It is a form of managed competition with four layers: presidents periodically set boundaries and reset the direction of the relationship; negotiating teams bargain between summits; reciprocal vulnerabilities discourage either side from overturning the entire relationship; and people-to-people exchanges attempt to create a broader social foundation beneath elite diplomacy.

Its durability will depend on whether these layers become stronger than the personalities that currently hold them together. The real test of the Washington summit is therefore not how many deals were announced. It is whether the next disagreement can be contained until the next meeting.

Related articles:

Beyond the Trade Truce: AI and the Next Phase of China–US Risk Management (3-minute read)

Before Washington: Xi and the Contest Over Global Leadership (3-minute read)

The September 24 Test: Iran, Protocol, and the Future of Xi-Trump Diplomacy (3-minute read)

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