Trump in China and the 13-out-of-10 problem

After a delay due to launching a war on Iran in late February, US President Donald Trump is finally confirmed to go to China on 14 May. This is the moment, heralded by his most recent bilateral with China’s Xi Jinping last October, when the “big, beautiful deal” with Beijing that Trump has often talked about has the chance to finally be revealed to the world.

Expectations, therefore, are high. But as ever with a master of hyperbole like the current US president, are they in danger of being dashed by hard reality?

For any other less mercurial politician, heading to China with hopes fanned would be regarded as foolhardy. The prudent approach would be to under-promise, on the chance you can then over-deliver. But for Trump, such a quotidian approach clearly does not appeal.

On the plane back to the US after meeting Xi on the margins of the APEC summit in Busan, South Korea last year, Trump declared that, on a scale of one to ten, his encounter with the president of the People’s Republic ranked “twelve”. The problem with the logic of this kind is that Trump now has to deliver the mathematical impossibility of 13 or above out of ten to better the last encounter.

The US and Chinese officials are extremely professional, and behind the scenes have been working hard on something that both sides can be happy with. So the notion that Trump’s hours on a plane to and from China will be completely wasted can be dismissed. What matters now is that both sides can feel at least some justification that what ends up being announced in Beijing will make them both look good. “Win-win” will be the optimal outcome – even if only the half relating to each leader’s country ends up getting promoted in messaging at home rather than the full deal.

The impression is of America making the moves and being in the role of supplicant with more pressure to strike a deal.

Practically, what can any agreement seek to address?

For the US, it is to continue to rectify the trade balance. While the total for goods and services between the two countries reached US$660 billion in 2024, trade suffered a nearly 25% fall in 2025. But structurally, nothing changed. For both years, the long-term trend of two thirds of the figure being exports to the US, and a third of imports from there to China, stayed the same. That has been the case for much of the last three decades – and a constant source of Trump’s frustration. The partial deal last time he was in the White House in 2020 committed China to purchasing more American goods. That resulted in a surge in soya bean purchases – something that temporarily collapsed when Trump imposed tariffs last year.

Beyond soya beans, it is hard to know what more China might buy. It is unlikely to want the kind of things America would like to sell it (American manufactured goods, which are too expensive), and those it does desire in the hi-tech sector, which America won’t allow to be sold. The same issue relates to investment, where China may well be willing to commit more to the US, but where legislation has toughened and opportunities on security grounds narrowed.

The other mystery is around the usual common ground where deals and accords can focus on in recent years. With the Biden administration, however choppy the relationship became, there was the consolation that on the environment, and to a large extent on AI regulation, the two powers agreed more than they disagreed. But even here, Trump’s administration is increasingly out of step with the rest of the world, espousing climate change scepticism, being against most forms of public health collaboration because of its anger over the World Health Organisation during the Covid-19 pandemic, and being far more complex and conflicted over general approaches to AI.

China is still the US’s second-largest research and development collaborator. But it is unlikely that this area will be of much interest to Trump, largely because for much of the time this issue of Chinese technology and intellectual property has become mixed up in security, rather than knowledge exchange.

All we can hope for seems to be a better mutual understanding of their responsibility to manage their relationship and prevent escalation. For China, there is the opportunity to offer at least some mediation between the US and Iran, particularly given it hosted Tehran’s foreign minister the week before. China may even have some role to play over Russia and Ukraine, with Vladimir Putin likely to be in Beijing only a week after Trump. For the US, some effort to impress on Beijing the continuing need for stability and observance of the status quo over Taiwan would be timely – particularly in view of the geopolitical turbulence over the last year.

For all of this, the fact remains: it is Trump who is making his way to Beijing, rather than the other way around (the last substantial visit by Xi specifically to the US was for the APEC summit in 2023; before that, the last Chinese state visit he made there was in 2015). That already creates the impression that it is America making the moves and being in the role of supplicant with more pressure to strike a deal.

Added to this is the vexed situation regarding Iran, which has widely been interpreted in China as a huge distraction on Washington, operating as a sap on its resources and a drag on its economy. Rightly or wrongly, at least in terms of perception, America looks weaker and its potency more frayed than ever before in recent decades. In this context, the greatest danger for Xi is to look over-confident, rather than beholden. But with an American president trying to achieve 13 out of ten, it may well be that he has no choice but to recognise that this has to be the greatest visit ever to his country by an American leader – and leave reality to the day after the delegation has headed home.