Why Trump’s Meeting With Xi Could Expose China’s Weaknesses

Hello, I'm Kelly Sadler, the commentary editor at The Washington Times. And this is Politically Unstable. Today, we are joined by Gordon Chang, who is a scholar of China's written several books on the topic, including The Coming Collapse of China. I mean, we'll be discussing the historic summit between President Trump and Xi Jinping. Gordon, I want to let I want to get your thoughts on what you think this summit should look like and what deliverables the president should come back with. Is it largely symbolic? Is the real meeting and the real negotiation going to happen in September? The president announced that he will be hosting Xi here in September. Just kind of give us the rundown of how you think it's been going and set some expectations for our audience, please. So far, it does not appear that either side has made a significant concession to the other. Xi Jinping clearly wants certain things that President Trump is not going to give him. And the opposite of that is also true. You know, there's a lot of commentary about how the United States comes into this meeting in a weakened condition, which I think underestimates America's strengths and overestimates China. Now, it's true Xi Jinping has a big built in advantage because he's got the home court. And also Xi Jinping is very arrogant. And that makes it for him a lot easier because he has a conception of the world that he's in control, but he's not. And the thing is that President Trump has a far stronger society behind him than Xi Jinping does. Xi's economy is stumbling badly. His demography is collapsing. He's got a very unhappy populace and the United States is resurgent. And by the way, this year's President Trump has been taking China's proxies off the board. Venezuela, Panama, we see very important American gains there. Iran is now been bombed and that has really been a Chinese proxy. So you put all this together. Xi Jinping is, I think, overestimating his strength and American commentators are overestimating his strength. Now, one of the things from the president's readout, President Trump's readout of their initial meeting was that China and Xi agree that Iran should never have a nuclear weapon and that China will do whatever it takes to support the U.S. in Iran. Is this I was a little hesitant that we did not hear the same thing come from the Chinese side. And we do know that Iran is a proxy for China. We know that China has been buying buys much of their oil, has been giving them the likes of drones and some things to use on the kinetic war field. So what do you take? What is your takeaway? What is your read on that? And if the president Trump made any inroads there? Probably the Chinese have made a few rhetorical concessions to President Trump. You know, this is typical American diplomacy where we try to encourage the Chinese to do the right thing. President Trump's done this and all of his predecessors have done this going back to Nixon. I think we need to take a different tack. The reason why there's a war right now is because China transplanted its nuclear weapons program to Iran. It did that directly and it also did that indirectly through the AQ Khan nuclear black market ring of Pakistan. I think the president needs to talk about that in public. And the reason is that the Chinese and others have made this war look, you know, like a war of choice, as you hear so often. Well, it's not because we know that the Chinese have armed up the Iranians. So at some point, the president Trump's going to have to pivot if he doesn't pivot. I don't think he's going to get the Chinese to do what we need them to, which is to back off Iran. They've been supplying these weapons, not just drones. It's also these anti-ship cruise missiles that Iran fired at the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group in late March. And it's everything else. Every Iranian weapon that has a microchip or virtually every Iranian weapon that has a microchip has a microchip that has been either manufactured in China or sourced by Chinese intermediaries for Iran. We need to start getting real and saying that in public because our approach of trying to sugarcoat things just has failed. One of the other takeaways from the two's bilateral meeting was a lot of pressure put on President Trump to change the US is stance on Taiwan. It's been one of strategic ambiguity, but he wants the president to publicly state that it is one China, one nation, and that we won't be selling arms to Taiwan, nor would we defend it if China wanted to retake the island. Kind of what is your sense with what's coming out from the Chinese side? We haven't heard how President Trump addressed kind of what were veiled threats coming from Xi regarding the Taiwan issue. Yes, we haven't heard anything from President Trump. A White House official talked to the media anonymously on an anonymous basis and said there's no change in US policy. And that's exactly what we should be doing. We shouldn't be changing our policy because of Chinese pressure. One thing, though, and that is American policy has been not to talk to China about arms sales to Taiwan. And we shouldn't be doing that. And the reason is it makes us look weak. And so we should defend our friends and partners and be telling the Chinese, look, you know, Taiwan is none of your business. People in Taiwan overwhelmingly self-identify not as Chinese, but as Taiwanese. And so this is and also the other thing is that the People's Republic has never exercised sovereignty or jurisdiction over Taiwan. And in fact, no Chinese regime has ever held indisputable sovereignty to the island. So we need to start saying these things in public and backing the Chinese off. The Chinese tell us, oh, you know, Taiwan's a red line. Well, China, in fact, doesn't have red lines. They tell us they do, but they are willing to move those red lines when they feel that their bargaining position has changed, either strengthened or weakened. So everything is negotiable. We shouldn't let the Chinese intimidate us. And we should just tell the Chinese that this is not their business. The other thing that has been stated in news media that China wants from the U.S. is they want to bring their cars over here to the U.S. and have the market to be open to them. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are saying this is a national security threat. This technology in these cars could undermine U.S. security, as well as the automakers in Detroit saying that, you know, they sell them their state subsidized cars. They can sell them at a lower price point and it would put us out of business. And they issued these warnings to President Trump before he left on his trip. But we know that Canada, Carney, has struck a deal with Xi to import these automobiles. So kind of what is your take on that? And eventually, will they get a hold in the U.S. market? I can't talk about the future because President Trump has talked about allowing Chinese carmakers onto U.S. soil. But this would certainly undermine U.S. national security. This is not in our interest. There's going to be a lot of public opposition to it. And that opposition is certainly correct. Remember, all Chinese EVs transmit data back to China. So they are, as they say, rolling spy machines. So they see everything. Also, these cars, some of them have, you know, autonomous driving. That is a real danger because China could, for instance, just sort of stop every car if it wanted to. But more important, it could drive these cars off the cliff or into oncoming traffic. So there is no way that we should be allowing these vehicles onto America's soil. And then that's the other issue of China's in very substantial subsidies for Chinese carmakers. We should not allow them anywhere near our country. And the other thing is we should not allow Canadians who buy Chinese EVs to enter our roads for the same reasons. It seems it seems obvious, but that is you know, that was what was reported that China wanted. Now, in terms of the US and what we need from this, the president took with him over a dozen CEOs, Tim Cook from Apple being one of them, Elon Musk, the Nvidia's CEO, which we know is a chip maker. We know that China wants Nvidia's chips. What do you think the symbolism was for the president to take these CEOs over to meet with Xi? And what do these American businesses want from China? I suppose President Trump is using them as a bargaining chip to say, look, we can have these companies invest in China. But this is the wrong move, because it's one thing. I think it also weakens President Trump's position because the Chinese can see that we are eager to do business with them. And of course, Xi Jinping is going to say, oh, you know, we're going to further open up our economy. But we know that he has been closing it down. And we also know that over a course of a decade, he has been pressuring foreign companies because he wants to reserve the Chinese market for Chinese companies. And especially since March of 2023, the pressure on American and foreign companies has been intense. So I believe that it's in our interest to lessen the vulnerability of our companies to China rather than increasing that vulnerability. So this is important for us, and we're moving in the wrong direction. On chips, the only way China can compete with us on AI and this is the competition for the 21st century, the only way they can do that is with American chips. So why are we selling those chips to China? This became obvious in last year when DeepSeek, you know, DeepSeek on January 20 of last year released its R1 model. It shook the world. It took literally trillions of dollars off of equities in the United States. But in the middle of last year, DeepSeek just admitted it couldn't come up with its R2 model because it was using Huawei's Ascend chip and they couldn't get access to Nvidia's Blackwell chips, the most advanced American chips that there are. So we shouldn't be helping China compete with us. This is just wrong. But at the same time, China holds a bunch of rare earth minerals that we need to manufacture these chips and to generate AI technology. So the president is trying to find a deal there. Where do you see this going? And I mean, I believe that we here in the United States should be the mining our own rare earths. We've got we've got rare earths here in the United States, but due to environmentalist concerns and whatnot, we can't mine for them. But China can and it can not only within its own country, but it has been all over the world. Yes, but also we've got to remember that we've got a lot of leverage on our point. And I think it would be a win for President Trump if he just merely extended the trade truce that they negotiated Xi Jinping and President Trump negotiated in October in Busan, South Korea on rare earths. President Trump gets a lot of credit because he is moving at Trump speed to reduce our vulnerability to China on rare earths. You know, it's a question of mining, question of processing. But it's also technologies that reduce our need for rare earths. And another strategy can be recycling because we've got a lot of these rare earth in equipment and computers we already have. We can recycle. Recycling is not something that Americans like to do, but this is an emergency. So I think President Trump gets a lot of credit here. And in a couple of years, we will not be talking about China's near monopoly on rare earths. The other thing or the other element, Newsy piece that's coming out of this summit is the negotiations that Scott Besant, the treasury secretary, is trying to form some sort of U.S. Chinese business council. The details on this are murky, but it would allow perhaps some Chinese companies to manufacture their items here domestically. This brings out a lot of concern for me. You know, we're we're afraid of the Chinese buying up our farm land and and monitoring our U.S. military bases, allowing it wouldn't be for high tech things like chips, but like domestic manufacturing, ensuring it from China. What do you make of that? And are there any red flags there for you? President Trump has said he wants a trillion dollars of Chinese investment in our country. That is wrong because first of all, every Chinese factory is another base of Chinese subversion in our country. And we're being overwhelmed. The federal government is overwhelmed. Local governments are overwhelmed. We've got all of these Chinese spies, agents and operatives and soldiers running around our country. We don't need to give them more places of refuge. Also, there is the Chinese biological weapons facilities that we found. We've got two of them, one of them in Reedley, California, the other in Las Vegas. There is obviously a third one that we have yet to discover. We've got these illicit Chinese police stations here. We could lose. We're a far stronger society than China, but we could lose it because we're not removing China's obvious basis of subversion. We know that the Chinese agents are studying our patterns, are looking for vulnerabilities. I think they're just waiting for the go signal to strike. And when they strike, there's going to be war on the American soil. The first one we've had since 1812, a foreign sustained attack on our country. So this is serious. And I don't think that President Trump understands the vulnerabilities that we have. And we certainly have, we've seen an FBI that has been lax in dealing with this, these Chinese subversives subversives on our soil. Well, just this week, there was one arrested. She became the mayor of Arcadia, California, pled guilty to being a Chinese spy and working for the CCP, spreading their propaganda here in the United States domestically. But, you know, moving on from that, there was rumors. We know that Jimmy Lai has been imprisoned in Hong Kong unfairly. There's human rights violations throughout China, mainly with the Uyghur population, which they use to, you know, to produce cotton, textiles, whatnot. The president, before going over to China, seemed called that Jimmy Lai calls bedlam for President Xi and releasing him for jail would be like asking President Trump to release Jim Comey from jail. It'd be something that was very difficult for him to do. Do you see this president going light on China's human rights violations and not not pressing Xi enough, you know, perhaps even if it was a prisoner swap to free Jimmy Lai? Yes, President Trump does not talk about human rights. That is consistent with American foreign policy. That doesn't really make this a priority. The Chinese make it a priority. They put their best diplomats in their human rights divisions because they realize how vulnerable they are. I just this is this is something which we have an important advantage and we don't understand it. We're Americans. We live in a government that is legitimate. So, you know, Republicans, conservatives, liberals, Democrats, we just don't understand it. But the Chinese do. And we're in a fight with China, which is far more consequential than we Americans think, because for various reasons. And so, yeah, we need to be talking about human rights because it's a Chinese vulnerability. It puts them on the back foot. It gives us a really critical advantage. So this is a failure of American society in general. Is there any other thoughts you have on the summit takeaways, things that we should be looking for? There's so many things to be looking for. The point here is that, yes, Xi Jinping is home court advantage, but President Trump, I think, goes into this summit with a lot more leverage than people think. And I think that really what Trump is doing is he's really ambitious. He is trying to enlist China to stabilize the world. Now, the Chinese are destabilizing it. Trump understands that. At some point, though, I think that we as a country are going to understand that we cannot try to get along with China because China is not trying to get along with us. Remember fentanyl. Fentanyl last year, 48,000 Americans perished. We call them overdoses, but they really should be considered murderers because the Communist Party is fully behind the Chinese fentanyl gangs. We can see this because Chinese diplomats give cover to the gangs. Every container that leaves China is inspected by officials. The fentanyl gangs launder their proceeds through Chinese banks, which are tightly controlled. China's own TikTok, when it was fully controlled by Beijing, promoted illicit drug use in the United States. A lot of these fentanyl producers are state owned. The Chinese central government gives subsidies for the production of fentanyl. This is just a story that we've got to recognize. And one more thing, if I can. Xi Jinping has made four promises to American presidents to stop the fentanyl trade. To Obama in 2016, to Trump in 2018, to Biden in 2023, and to Trump in 2025. And he's violated all of those promises, including the 2025 promise, as we know from President Trump's own drug czar, Sarah Carter. So we need to get real about this and we cannot allow the Chinese to kill Americans. It is just not only a strategic issue, it's a moral issue. Gordon Chang, thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate your time and expertise. Thank you, Kelly.