What Trump’s Personalized Presidency Means for China

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump suggests a pathway for U.S.-China relations with an invite to his inauguration, Britain’s Prince Andrew gets caught up in a scandal involving a Chinese businessman, and the U.S. Congress extends a science cooperation deal despite some opposition.

Trump’s Inauguration Invite Sends Signal

Last week, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, in an unconventional move, invited Chinese President Xi Jinping to his inauguration in January, adding that he and Xi could work together “to solve all the problems of the world.” Trump’s words probably mean little, yet they may offer a pathway for China to approach the new administration—one that it is still unlikely to take.

Xi is not expected to attend the inauguration himself and will instead send a representative in his place. This is in part because the Chinese leader, like Trump, is fluent in the language of dominating and embarrassing political rivals: Xi knows that his attendance would be read as supplication, and he has no interest in playing along.

Trump’s invitation isn’t entirely insincere. He has repeatedly praised Xi, often while threatening tough trade actions against China. This posturing seems to be part of his idea of diplomacy: that it can be settled through personalized meetings with the men in charge, whether that is Russian President Vladimir Putin or North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Yet while Trump and Xi met several times during his first term, none of the summits produced substantial advances in U.S.-China relations. Perhaps that is because China is reluctant to take full advantage of Trump’s desire for personal contact and potential favor trading. No “grand bargain” has ever been on the horizon.

There are a few reasons for that. Chinese political leadership often buys into its own propaganda—expecting that Western democratic norms must function as a veil over the real operation of power, much like China’s own claims of being democratic. That means seeing Trump as unable to make fundamental changes in turn.

The continuity of harsh trade policies and a more hawkish stance during the Biden administration reinforced that belief, even after the largely successful restoration of normal relations in 2023. Moreover, the new tone on China during Trump’s first term was largely shaped by the people around him—such as Mike Pompeo and Matt Pottinger—rather than by the president himself.

Trump’s second-term appointments include many China hard-liners, from a returning Peter Navarro to Sen. Marco Rubio. The Republican Party is still split over whether to see China as an existential enemy or merely a serious opponent. Trump could push the party to shift positions, but there is no sign that he cares about a deal with Beijing as much as he cares about tariffs.

China is also largely unable to build the kinds of ties with Trump’s inner circle that its neighbors, such as Taiwan or South Korea, have worked toward. Any claims of “friendship” between U.S. and Chinese officials are usually not based in reality.

There are structural obstacles to closer personal ties on both sides. U.S. officials and analysts largely can’t maintain the same personal links with their Chinese counterparts that they do with South Korean or Japanese officials for fear of being marked as a security risk. Chinese officials are in more danger when it comes to unauthorized contacts.

Thus, any lobbying must go through third parties—and even Hong Kong organizations, which used to provide plausible deniability, have lost credibility in the United States since China has undermined political freedoms in the territory.

There is one clear way that China can take advantage of a personalized U.S. presidency: Chinese firms have already shown that they can win exemptions by paying homage to Trump. ZTE did this during his first term, and TikTok is attempting it now. The outcome might show Beijing a way forward to more Trump deals.

What We’re Following

Prince Andrew scandal. Britain’s Prince Andrew is caught up in yet another contretemps, this time relating to his association with Yang Tengbo, a Chinese businessman now banned from entering the United Kingdom on national security grounds.

Yang, an alleged agent of influence previously known in the British press as H6, was named by Radio Free Asia last week before his identity became public in the United Kingdom. Befriending Yang is just the latest of Andrew’s bad decisions to become public.

Yang headed a few U.K.-China business associations and became a senior advisor to the prince; he was empowered to act on his behalf in financial dealings in China. But this likely wasn’t a Chinese plot to target the British throne. I would expect that Yang made the initial contact by chance and was able to use it to bolster his own standing with the security state back in China.

The affair has exposed a fight inside the British state: The Labour Party government, which won this year’s elections by a landslide, plans to introduce a Foreign Influence Registration Act next year, inherited from Conservative Party plans and loosely modeled on the U.S. registry. The act will demand a higher level of registration for countries in the “advanced tier,” such as China.

The Labour Party is desperate to build better relations with Beijing for economic reasons and was rumored to be moving China to a lower tier. The Andrew story was likely leaked to put pressure on China and could scupper those plans.

Anti-corruption purges. A speech by Xi at an anti-corruption meeting in January, in which he said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had to “turn the knife inward,” was published in Qiushi, the party’s main journal, on Monday. It was likely released as part of an ongoing campaign against military corruption, which recently saw the fall of high-level official Miao Hua, in addition to two defense ministers in the last two years.

Xi has used anti-corruption drives against his political enemies since the start of his rule. But his belief that corruption poses an existential threat to the CCP is sincere (despite his family’s own huge personal wealth).

In the 2000s, there was a growing belief among some party leaders that they needed to open up the government to some public scrutiny to contain corruption. However, Xi sees openness as just as much of a threat as corruption itself. He insists entirely on internal discipline—keeping the process fully in his control.

FP’s Most Read This Week

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Tech and Business

Science deal survives. A key U.S.-China scientific cooperation deal initially signed in 1979 was renewed this week despite opposition from some U.S. lawmakers. It includes strengthened provisions on intellectual property protection, though it’s unclear if China will effectively apply the provisions; it has regularly encouraged firms to steal U.S. intellectual property, and has aided them in doing so.

The Trump administration’s China Initiative, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, damaged scientific cooperation between the United States and China during the president-elect’s first term. The China Initiative drew attention to the blurred lines around some U.S.-based scientists and Chinese funding, but it was widely seen as a failure that turned into a witch hunt against ethnically Chinese scientists, alienating scientific talent.

Meanwhile, the old dynamics that saw China seeking U.S. intellectual property to catch up have been reversed in some fields, such as electric vehicles.

Salt Typhoon response. The ripple effects of Salt Typhoon, China’s massive hack of U.S. telecommunications infrastructure in the spring, continue to grow. Washington’s first retaliatory move is a ban on China Telecom’s operations in the United States—which means little, given existing heavy restrictions on the state-owned giant.

But the main impact of the hack may be political. Salt Typhoon’s reach is dramatic enough that congressional briefings on the issue are pushing relative moderates on Chinese influence into the hawkish camp. It could set the tone for Congress’s approach in the upcoming term.