WASHINGTON – China, the adversary. China, the friend? These days, maybe a bit of both.
From easing export controls to reportedly blocking the Taiwanese president's plans to travel through the United States, President Donald Trump is raising eyebrows in Washington that he might offer concessions that could hurt U.S. interests in his quest to meet, and reach a deal with, the Chinese leader.
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There is no firm plan for Trump to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping. But it's widely believed that the men must meet in person, likely in the fall, for the two governments to ink a trade deal, and some are worried that Xi is leveraging Trump's desire for more giveaways.
"The summit mismatch is real. There’s a clear gap between Trump’s eagerness for a face-to-face with Xi and Beijing’s reluctance to engage," said Craig Singleton, senior director of the China program at the Washington-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
There are concerns that Trump may throttle back on export controls or investment curbs to preserve summit prospects, Singleton said, warning the risk “isn't just in giving away too much” but also "in letting Beijing set the tempo.”
China-U.S. relations have pinballed often since Washington established relations with communist-led Beijing in 1979. They've hit highs and lows — the latter in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, after a 2001 incident involving a U.S. spy plane, during the COVID pandemic and right now. Both countries have struggled to understand each other, which has sometimes gotten in the way of deeper partnerships.
And this time around, there's a wild card: the anything-might-happen second presidency of Trump.
Disputes often accompany potential US-China leader meetings
Efforts by a U.S. president to meet the head of the authoritarian Chinese government have often met with partisan outcries — which happened when former President Joe Biden hosted Xi in California in 2023. But Trump's case is peculiar, partly because he is willing to break with conventional political restraints to make deals and partly because his own party has grown hawkish towards China over national security.
“With President Trump, everything seems to be open for negotiation, and there are few if any red lines,” said Gabriel Wildau, managing director of the global consultancy Teneo. “The hawks worry that if Trump gets into a room with Xi, he will agree to extraordinary concessions, especially if he believes that a big, beautiful deal is within reach.”
While most Republican lawmakers have not voiced their concerns openly, Democrats are vocal in their opposition. "President Trump is giving away the farm to Xi just so he can save face and reach a nonsensical trade deal with Beijing that will hurt American families economically," said Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
On Tuesday, Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said the Trump administration “has not wavered — and will never waver — in safeguarding our national and economic security to put America first.”
“The administration continues to have productive conversations with China to address longstanding unfair trade practices,” Desai said, adding that export controls on cutting-edge technology and many tariffs remain in place.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, after his latest round of trade negotiations with the Chinese in July, told CNBC that the team was “very careful to keep trade and national security separate.” And Secretary of State Marco Rubio, appearing on Fox News Radio, said the U.S. remains “as committed as ever to our partners ... in places like Taiwan” but also spoke of the strategic need to keep trade ties with China steady.
“In the end, we have two big, the two largest economies in the world,” Rubio said. “An all-out trade conflict between the U.S. and China, I think the U.S. would benefit from it in some ways, but the world would be hurt by it."
There's worry over Taiwan
Taiwan is concerned that the self-governing island could be “trade-able” when Trump seeks a deal with Beijing, said Jason Hsu, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former legislator in Taiwan. “Our concern is that, will any of the trade deals lead to concession on political support for Taiwan?" Hsu said, citing the case last month where the White House allegedly blocked a request for Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te to transit through the United States.
The U.S. maintains unofficial ties with Taiwan and has always allowed such transits in the past. Experts are worried that the Trump administration is setting a bad precedent, and Democrats have seized on it to criticize Trump.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on China, called the move “both a sharp break from precedent and another example of the Trump administration caving to China in hopes of reaching a trade deal." He said the policy decision “sends a dangerous signal” that Taiwan’s democracy is negotiable.
Hsu said Taiwan fears that Trump could be coerced or compelled to support the one-China principle, as espoused by Beijing, that acknowledges Beijing's sovereignty claim over the island. There are also concerns that Trump might utter anything in support of “unification." That was a request Beijing raised with the Biden administration, though it failed to get a positive response.
Now, it's upon Taiwan to persuade Trump to think of the island as “an economic partner rather than something that he can trade when he negotiates with China,” Hsu said, suggesting that Taiwan step up defense commitments, increase energy procurement, open its market to U.S. companies and invest more in the U.S.
But Sun Yun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, said Trump is bound by the Taiwan Relations Act, a domestic law that obligates the U.S. to maintain an unofficial relationship with the island and provides it with sufficient hardware to deter any invasion by China.
“He can dial the (U.S.-Taiwan) relationship up and down," Sun said, "but he can’t remove the relationship.”
Export controls have been instituted, to mixed results
In April, the White House, citing national security, announced it would restrict sales of Nvidia’s H20 computer chips to China. The ban was lifted about three months later, when the two governments had climbed down from sky-high tariffs and harsh trade restrictions.
The decision upset both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. Rep. John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on China, wrote to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to stress that the U.S. cannot let the Chinese Communist Party “use American chips to train AI models that will power its military, censor its people, and undercut American innovation.”
In Stockholm, Bessent pushed back at the concern that national security might be compromised. “We are very diligent,” Bessent said, adding there's an interagency process that involves the National Security Council and the Defense Department for decisions.
“There's nothing that's being exchanged for anything,” Bessent said. Addressing H20 chips specifically, Bessent said they “are well down" Nvidia's "technology chips stack.” U.S. companies are banned from selling their most advanced chips to China.
That might not be persuasive enough.
Teneo's Wildau said China hawks are most worried that the H20 decision could be the beginning of a series of moves to roll back export controls from the Biden era, which were once considered “permanent and non-negotiable.”