How Trump will avoid falling into Xi’s trap, according to his China adviser

 When Donald Trump sits down with Xi Jinping on Thursday, he will draw from a playbook developed during five previous meetings with the president of China.

One of his most senior officials will likely present US complaints about everything from trade imbalances or soybean purchases to export controls on valuable rare minerals or the neverending supply of deadly fentanyl, according to Michael Pillsbury, historian of China and informal adviser to the president.

Then Mr Trump will lean in and offer his help in sealing the deal between two old friends.

“It’s very clever tactically for Trump to do this rather than himself, listing all of our grievances against Chinese trade practices, for example,” he said.

“Trump is going to focus on his overall strategic relationship with Xi.”

Their meeting in Busan, South Korea, will be the first of Mr Trump’s second term. It comes at a critical moment in relations between the two countries, and will showcase two very different styles, one based on freewheeling personal diplomacy and another based on meticulous preparation and iron-willed discipline.

Mr Trump has taken a more aggressive approach since returning to office, slapping 55 per cent tariffs on Chinese products.

Beijing has refused to back down, introducing its own tariffs and halting purchases of soybeans.

When it imposed new controls on rare earth metals – crucial for everything from smartphones to electric vehicles – Mr Trump responded by threatening 100 per cent tariffs on all Chinese exports.

Ahead of the summit, both sides said they were drawing closer to an agreement to ease tensions. China’s top trade negotiator, Li Chenggang, said negotiators had reached a “preliminary consensus”, and Scott Bessent, Mr Trump’s treasury secretary, said there was “a very successful framework”.

Mr Pillsbury had a ringside seat at talks in the first term. His book, The Hundred-Year Marathon, was passed around the West Wing and was cited as raising the alarm in Washington about China’s plans for world domination.

In 2018, he huddled with Mr Trump’s top team in the Oval Office to plan tactics ahead of the president’s summit with Xi in Argentina.

This year, he has been a frequent visitor to the White House (“That I’m encouraged not to say anything about, if you don’t mind”) as he interviews the president for a follow-up book on Chinese-US relations.

He said it was clear the president was preparing the ground to use his personal relationship with Xi to bring results.

“You know, if you notice the last two or three social media postings, I think the phrase much respected Xi Jinping was thrown in, and it’s almost like someone else is doing these things in China, not my friend Xi Jinping,” he said.

It is part of a more conciliatory set of public statements during the building up of the high-risk, high-reward summit.

“Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine! Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment,” posted Mr Trump, calming markets that had been on a rollercoaster ride since he threatened 100 per cent tariffs.

“He doesn’t want Depression for his country, and neither do I. The USA wants to help China, not hurt it!!! President DJT.”

That approach has worried some China hawks who see Mr Trump’s freewheeling style of personal diplomacy as no match for Xi’s discipline.

In his memoir, John Bolton, Mr Trump’s former national security adviser, describes how at the summit in Buenos Aires the Chinese leader “read steadily through notecards doubtless all of it hashed out arduously in advanced planning”.

The leaders will be flying in from very different domestic situations. While Mr Trump’s federal government is shut down over a funding impasse with Democrats, the Chinese leader is coming off a huge show of strength.

Last week, Xi presided over a major meeting of his ruling Communist Party, where officials set out its goals for the next five years. China watchers said the timing, set by Xi to fall just ahead of the summit, was no coincidence.

His gathering in Beijing was most notable for what Neil Thomas, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Centre for China Analysis, described as “empty chairs at empty tables,” echoing a line from Les Miserables about revolutionaries killed by French troops.

Only 168 of the 205 Central Committee members turned up, the lowest attendance rate since the Cultural Revolution, according to a tally maintained by Bloomberg News.

Although no official reason was given, it suggests that Xi’s corruption purges run deeper and wider than previously thought.

Ahead of the meeting, the defence ministry announced that nine senior officers suspected of corruption had been expelled from the Communist Party.

The plenum, as it is known, also set out the party’s number one priority for the next five years: strengthening its manufacturing base. That marks a direct snub to Washington, which wants China to focus on stoking consumption rather than production in order to rebalance world trade.

“If Xi pulls this off, the trade tensions and volatility that we’ve seen in 2025 will look like child’s play compared with what’s coming,” said Andrew Polk, head of economic research at Trivium China, a Beijing-based strategic advisory firm.

It all builds on Beijing’s announcement earlier this month of its strict controls on rare earths, said Jonathan Czin, a Brookings Institution fellow and a former China expert at the CIA.

“Xi is going on the offence,” he said. “This was a strategic move. It wasn’t just a tactical move that was focused on the next round of meetings.”

China produces more than 90 per cent of the world’s rare earths. Under the new measures, foreign firms must get Beijing’s approval to export products made with even trace amounts of Chinese material.

The controls are due to be imposed a month after the summit, and will likely produce a chokepoint across high-tech industry.

A similar pivot has taken place across a range of issues. Where once it played down its growing military might, now it is talking it up.

Its full nuclear triad of missiles launched by land, air, and sea was on display in September, when North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin stood side by side with Xi.

And officials have deployed sharper rhetoric when it comes to talking about the US.

Where before they might emphasise the need for “dialogue” to ease “tensions,” last week the foreign ministry spokesman directly accused the US of “cyberattacks and infiltration” of key infrastructure.

Xi also reportedly wants Washington to change its language on Taiwan and declare it is “opposed” to the island’s independence.

US administrations have long pursued a policy of “strategic ambiguity,” saying they do not support Taiwan’s independence and acknowledging Beijing’s claim to the territory, while still occupying a diplomatic grey area.

Mr Czin said it all suggested Xi was gearing up to do battle at the summit.

“And it also reminds me a lot more of Xi Jinping’s first term in office, where, for those of us in government at the time, we would wake up every morning and wonder what move Xi was going to pull that day,” he said.

A trade deal, he added, would simply buy time for Beijing’s longer term goal of dominating the tech space.

The danger for Mr Trump was that he had prepared for a “single player game”, said Ryan Hass, former National Security Council director for China, failing to leave space for Xi’s demands and responses.

“I’ve never encountered anyone as cold blooded in their calculations of national or personal interest as Xi Jinping, and I don’t expect that that is going to change anytime soon,” he said.

“He is not emotionally soft. He is not easily swayed by charm, and I think that we should take that into account.”

A senior US official said Mr Trump was intent on keeping the conversation laser-focused on trade, rather than Taiwan or other complicating issues.

“But I’m sure the president will be prepared to respond,” he said, to anything Xi raises.

This will be the sixth time the two leaders have met, starting with a two-day summit at Mar-a-Lago back in 2017, when they famously discussed bilateral relations surrounded by dressed up Palm Beach socialites dining on the club terrace.

That depth of experience made Mr Trump more knowledgeable about Mr Xi than anyone else in his administration, said Mr Pillsbury.

“Some summits between Presidents and foreign leaders involve talking points in an attempt to agree on something,” he said.

“But I think the Trump investment was understanding better how Xi Jinping thinks in particular about specific issues that we care about.”

Sticking to his instincts, letting others in his team take care of the confrontations while the president takes a more indirect approach appeals to Chinese sensibilities, he said.

His advice was to agree to set up joint task forces on fentanyl, money laundering and maybe soybeans, allowing tariff deadlines to be pushed back and setting the tone for more talks later on trade.

The worst case scenario would be an awkward conversation about China’s growing support for Russia or a back and forth over the future of Taiwan.