{"id":11287,"date":"2026-05-14T08:51:52","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T08:51:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/radiobaayiyobakool.com\/?p=11287"},"modified":"2026-05-14T08:51:52","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T08:51:52","slug":"trump-xi-summit-why-beijing-might-have-the-advantage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiobaayiyobakool.com\/?p=11287","title":{"rendered":"Trump-Xi summit: Why Beijing might have the advantage."},"content":{"rendered":"

Thursday 14 May 2026 {CBB}<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>With the leaders of the United States and China set to meet this week, experts say this is the best time for President Xi Jinping to negotiate. The US is busy with wars in the Middle East, and President Donald Trump\u2019s approval rating is cratering at home: he is desperate for a win, which could give China the upper hand.<\/p>\n

Trade between the world\u2019s two largest economies has been disrupted since Trump returned to office last year and unleashed a series of tariffs on the world, imposing some of the highest rates on China, 145 percent at one point.<\/p>\n

Beijing retaliated with its own tariffs and halted the exports of rare earth metals, an essential component for a range of industries, including cars and smartphones, and which China has a monopoly in.<\/p>\n

While things have eased slightly since the peak of that freeze, they are far from normal.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrade relations really, really deteriorated. US imports from China fell by more than 25 percent and exports to China fell by 25 percent or more. Those are huge numbers in one year,\u201d said Chad Bown, the Reginald Jones senior fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics (PIIE).<\/p>\n

\u201cThere doesn\u2019t seem to be any floor to how bad the relationship is.\u201d<\/p>\n

By one estimate, US exports to China would have been nearly 60 percent higher in 2025, or roughly $90bn annually, without Trump\u2019s trade wars, Bown says.<\/p>\n

Even as US imports from China fell fell \u2013 down 4 percent in 2025 to 9 percent of imports \u2013 its imports from other countries rose 9 percent, as per PIIE\u2019s Bown, as businesses adapted to the higher tariffs imposed on China to move their supply chains to other countries, including Mexico, Vietnam and Taiwan.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s trade surplus hit a high of nearly $1.2 trillion last year as it made up for reduced trade with the US by increasing business with other parts of the world, showing \u201cit has moved away from its reliance on the US,\u201d says Dexter Tiff Roberts, a nonresident senior fellow at the Global China Hub at the Atlantic Council.<\/p>\n

Tensions between the two countries continued even after they met in late October in South Korea on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, and have not eased much since.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is an important trip,\u201d said Wei Liang, professor at Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey. \u201cRight now, it\u2019s chaotic, and both sides have lost hope on what they can do bilaterally.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Trump\u2019s first trip to China since 2017, and arrived in Beijing on Wednesday, ahead of talks planned for Thursday and Friday.<\/p>\n

Experts agree that China has the upper hand.<\/p>\n

For one, its exports have not suffered. For another, it has developed a gas pipeline through Central Asia, securing some of its energy needs, and is not tangled in wars in Iran or elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now is the best time for Xi to have this negotiation as the US is busy with wars, and domestically, Trump\u2019s rating is low, and he needs a win, especially with midterm elections coming up in the US in November,\u201d said Liang.<\/p>\n

A Reuters\/Ipsos poll late last month showed 34 percent of Americans approve of Trump\u2019s performance in the White House, down from 36 percent in a prior Reuters\/Ipsos survey in mid-April. Trump\u2019s standing with the US public has trended lower since taking office in January 2025, when it was at 47 percent.<\/p>\n

The US-Israel war on Iran and its retaliation in the Strait of Hormuz, a main chokepoint for oil and gas shipments, have sent energy prices soaring. On Monday, the international benchmark, Brent crude, was up 3 percent from Friday\u2019s close at $104 after Trump said the ceasefire with Iran was on \u201clife support\u201d. That has also sent up prices at the pump to an average of $4.48 per gallon on Monday, according to GasBuddy data, with some states seeing much higher pain at $6.10 in California, $5.72 in Washington and $5.60 in Hawaii.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, data from the US Department of Labor showed that consumer inflation had jumped to 3.8 percent from a year ago, as the war with Iran pushed energy prices higher.<\/p>\n

\u201cXi has no pressure domestically, but Trump will be eager to reach an agreement on something so he can present it domestically\u2026 he has a sense of urgency,\u201d said Liang.<\/p>\n

While Beijing\u2019s need is not as immediate as Washington\u2019s, it knows that tariffs and trade tensions are unsustainable and is therefore willing to negotiate, especially while it has the upper hand, experts say.<\/p>\n

China wants regular access to high-technology chips, or at least tools to make them, so it can develop its own industry and expertise, as well as some concessions on Taiwan.<\/p>\n

The US will also want Chinese help in reopening the Strait of Hormuz with its ally Iran.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re basically inviting China to contribute to a marine expedition \u2013 it\u2019s amazing how far the White House has come,\u201d the Atlantic Council\u2019s Roberts told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

In exchange, the US will want China to commit to big-ticket purchases, including soybeans, Boeing airliners and energy supplies, such as coal and gas.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo much of what the US is trying to accomplish now is undoing damage it created earlier,\u201d said Roberts. \u201cChina is aware and astonished at their good fortune. They can sit back and let the US damage its global standing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thursday 14 May 2026 {CBB}\u00a0With the leaders of the United States and China set to meet this week, experts say this is the best time for President Xi Jinping to negotiate. The US is busy with wars in the Middle East, and President Donald Trump\u2019s approval rating is cratering at home: he is desperate for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":11288,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiobaayiyobakool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiobaayiyobakool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiobaayiyobakool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiobaayiyobakool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiobaayiyobakool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11287"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiobaayiyobakool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11290,"href":"https:\/\/radiobaayiyobakool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11287\/revisions\/11290"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiobaayiyobakool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiobaayiyobakool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiobaayiyobakool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiobaayiyobakool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}