Trump at the Imperial Court

Chang and Ian unpack Trump's historic summit with Xi Jinping. They discuss the pageantry, the Taiwan question, the first serious bilateral talks on AI, plus the echoes of Marco Polo and the Macartney Missions: the consistent awe and fear that transpires whenever the West encounters the Middle Kingdom.

Transcript

Chang Che: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Into Asia. It's been a pretty busy few days. Ian, I heard that you are in Europe.

Ian Buruma: I'm in Europe on a little tour of various European countries to see family and friends.

Chang Che: So it's a personal trip, not business?

Ian Buruma: Personal.

Chang Che: No book tour for your recent book on Berlin?

Ian Buruma: No book tour, even though I did an interview in London, but that was about the extent of it.

Chang Che: Great. I just came out of Asia as the Trump summit with Xi Jinping is happening, and have landed in New York. It's been an interesting experience China-watching from afar as Donald Trump flew to Asia. And a lot of the journalists — what they call the pool of journalists that follow Donald Trump on Air Force One — also went to China to cover the summit. I'm curious, how have you been consuming the coverage?

Ian Buruma: I have been watching the videos. The word "pool" reminds me of when I myself was a reporter in one of those pools in China, which was in 1988, I think, when we followed the then Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth, and her husband, Prince Philip, around on the royal tour of China. The pools were very important. The royal watchers who were used to following the Queen around on these tours were very worried that there wasn't really a story. The first story that was pooled was the question, during a banquet in Shanghai, whether the Queen would eat sea cucumber, I think. The conclusion was that she indeed ate a sea cucumber. But I don't think that's the kind of thing — the journalists around Trump are probably equally frivolous as we were.

But what I thought was interesting were the visuals of it. It showed very much China showing off its power, the longevity of its great civilization, and so on, to a rather crass American, who knows little about anything, who was clearly very impressed. So it was sort of back to the many centuries ago when China saw itself as the superior — the Middle Kingdom — an ancient civilization, but really didn't need business with barbarians from the West. And again, Trump seemed to be sort of begging for business, hoping to make lots of money from this huge market. And in that sense, it was not so different from earlier missions from Europe, such as the famous Macartney mission, always with this dream of getting very rich off this huge market in China.

Chang Che: There was this layered aspect of the Trump visit that I was thinking about, which is that any previous US president, I think, would go into these summits with some dose of cynicism and some awareness that these kinds of pomp and ceremonial celebrations that the Chinese put on is part of their tradition. It's part of a kind of regal, imperial, but also authoritarian cult-of-personality type tradition, including the children that are waving. And Chinese are aware of this too. So if you look on Twitter or Threads, where Chinese are posting about it — because you can't post about it on Weibo, which is censored — there's a sense of irony around these kinds of celebrations. I think if, for example, Obama had come to visit, they would also be aware of this in the back of their heads. But the funny thing about Trump is that he just doesn't have that awareness. So he comes into this with this surprise, like, what an amazing reception that they have put on for me. There's waving children, look at this military. He's like a kid in a candy store.

Ian Buruma: There are nuances in the way that Chinese flatter visitors, and sometimes visitors are snubbed if the Chinese government is angry with them for one reason or another. It depends on who meets the visiting dignitary at the airport, whether they're shown around the Junggong High, whether Chinese leaders live, who sits where at the banquet — and all those things send signals. And the Chinese, as you point out, are past masters at that, because they have a very long tradition of that kind of ritual.

Now, it's true that Trump is naïve and thinks it's all for him. And when he was shown around the Junggong High, he asked whether other foreign leaders had been there before him. And Xi Jinping said hen shao — very few.

Chang Che: I think you also mean Putin, probably, except maybe Putin.

Ian Buruma: And Trump was pleased as punch. But Xi Jinping also knows Trump's vulnerabilities. He knows that Trump is naïve and wants pomp and ceremony and wants to be reassured and made to feel that he's very important and so on. So they laid it on thick — not because they always do that, but also because they know that Trump is very susceptible to that kind of thing.

Chang Che: I think that gets us to what you think all this pomp and circumstance from the Chinese was meant to do. So in the Chinese readout, much of what they summarized about the discussions focused on Taiwan and what Xi Jinping was telling Trump on Taiwan. The rest was very vague. There was a wording about the Middle East, but even the word "Iran" or "Hormuz" was not touched on at all in the readout in the Chinese. The business partnerships and the economic partnerships, which was the major focus of the American readout, was very little discussed in the Chinese. So do you think it's right to say that part of the coddling of Trump is meant to try and get him to sway on Taiwan?

Ian Buruma: Yes, I do think that. And again, they know their man. They know how easy it is to get things out of him if you flatter him enough. Whether what he says at any moment is binding is another thing. I don't think that the visuals — the show — is insignificant, because up until — maybe this is the first time that the Chinese have made it very clear that they are at least equal to the United States as a great power. Since World War Two, the Americans are used to being the most powerful nation on earth, and their presidents needed to be paid proper deference for that reason. And in this case, it was very clear that Trump was not there — even though AI fakes have shown images of Trump bowing deeply to Xi, which apparently never happened, but it was very clear that, at least according to the visuals, it was not a case of the Americans coming to Beijing as the superior power.

And Trump wanted to get something out of Xi. Xi didn't necessarily want to get anything material out of Trump. Just like the emperor — the Qing emperors, who said, why should we buy anything that you have to offer? We have enough. It was the British, whoever it was, who went to Beijing to pay deference to the imperial court, who wanted business. What the Chinese side did want was indeed a concession on Taiwan. And since Trump is more interested in pomp and circumstance and show than he is in Taiwan, it was not a foolish assumption of the Chinese to think that they could get him to say something that could be construed as conceding to the Chinese long-term wishes over Taiwan.

Now, whether Trump did that or not, it's still a little unclear. As far as I know, the last thing he said on Air Force One is that he hadn't made up his mind yet whether the latest tranche of weapons would be sent to Taiwan. But at least it looks as though he hasn't verbally committed himself to anything that would shift the rhetoric.

Chang Che: Do you find yourself more content with the way that things went with regards to Trump's policy attitude to Taiwan? Or has this summit made you more nervous, because there are so many signals that kind of cut both ways? On the one hand, I'm actually kind of consistently surprised at how disciplined Trump is, relatively, on the Taiwan issue. Oftentimes, journalists will ask him these provocative questions that he just takes the bait on. He was asked one time, what does he think limits his power, and he was like, just my own mind — crazy responses he will sometimes take the bait on. But when it comes to Taiwan, he's very disciplined about saying whether the US will come to Taiwan's protection.

On the other hand, there was an interview with Fox News that he did after the summit, while he was in Beijing, where he clearly violates one of the principles of the Taiwan issue of his predecessors, which was that Taiwan arms sales was not something that the US would discuss with the Chinese. And he explicitly says, this is something that we're gonna have to discuss. Xi Jinping clearly does not want us to. And he explicitly says that Taiwan arms sales is a bargaining chip for them, which clearly does not give much confidence to Taiwan.

Ian Buruma: It's always hard to say what goes on in Trump's head. It may be that on issues that don't fundamentally interest him very much — and Taiwan would probably be one of them — he is more likely to listen to advisers like Marco Rubio and so on, who advise him what to say and what not to say. On issues that he cares about a bit more, like sticking it to the Europeans or something, he is less disciplined.

And I think linked to that thought is something else, which is that he respects great dictators in a way that he doesn't respect European prime ministers. He thinks they are basically weak. Their countries don't amount to much. They are dependent on the United States. They can be pushed around and bullied and so on. Whereas he doesn't behave that way with Putin, and he doesn't behave that way with Xi Jinping. He doesn't even behave that way with Kim Jong Un when he meets him. And North Korea is a far less significant country than Britain or Germany or France, even though it has nuclear weapons.

So he respects strong men. And I think he feels that the way the world should work is that it should be basically deals between strong men in charge of big powers, and the rest of the world should just fall into line. And so he is awed by Xi Jinping and by Chinese power. And again, he's not the first American statesman to be awed. In that sense, I think Henry Kissinger was a far more sophisticated operator than Donald Trump, obviously. I think he too was awed by the mystique of China as this great civilization, this potentially great power, where people understand power and so on. And he was, I think — others dispute this, but I think he was susceptible to giving in more than a naïf to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai and so on, because of that sense of awe.

And again, the Chinese are very, very good at making visitors feel that. And Xi Jinping's reception of Trump is a perfect example of that. So those may be reasons why Trump didn't say anything provocative. And one should be grateful for that, because anything to do with Trump — if it behaves halfway normally, that's always a — one always has a certain sense of relief.

Chang Che: Yeah, this summit reminds me of just the fact that nothing really came out of it, but the stability of the relationship was affirmed at many points in the summit. And coming out of that, the commentary on both sides, in China and the US, has been pretty positive — but not because there was any sort of major deals made, but just that the relationship seems to be on solid footing, the two leaders seem to like each other. That's really, I think, the best you can ask for with two superpowers who are locked in an intense AI competition.

Ian Buruma: Hang on. Just before you go on — I think the word "like" in the case of Xi Jinping is perhaps not the most appropriate term. I don't think Xi Jinping gives a damn. It's not about liking Trump or not liking Trump. He's the leader of China, and he'll do whatever is necessary.

Chang Che: But don't you think that as a strongman himself, he feels like he can deal with — maybe easier than Biden, from Xi's perspective? And this is just speculation, but I think that it would be a lot easier to deal with somebody like Trump on the Taiwan issue than Biden. I think that if you bring up the Taiwan issue to Biden, Biden has his position, and he's gonna be very clear and firm. But Trump is just — he's just a lot more flexible. He's like a deal-maker, so he's gonna listen.

Ian Buruma: But that makes it harder at the same time. Because to deal with somebody when you more or less know where they stand, it's easier to formulate a policy. Somebody who can change every day, it's much harder, in that sense. So I think it's very double-edged.

Chang Che: That makes sense. Yeah, so should we talk about AI? Or actually —

Ian Buruma: Let me bring up something — AI, you're the expert on the subject. I wanted —

Chang Che: — to bring up something about before that, which is related to AI. Which is that I think that listeners probably don't realize how few American journalists there are in China. Each of the American outfits has basically just one journalist in China. The New York Times, for example, only has one or two, I think. So the number of people on the ground who can cover what China is like — this vast country — is so few. And so this summit really gave America an opportunity to see China from the vantage point of a lot of journalists who sort of come — China opens up its doors for foreign journalists doing these kinds of big summits. And so what you got to see were journalists — video journalists — going to try Chinese robots and going to schools to see Chinese using AI. And you got to kind of see that aspect — how China was approaching AI through the lens of video journalism, really for the first time, towards a mass American audience.

So what struck me was that kind of increased exposure and the difference in some ways about the way that Chinese approach AI versus the US. So one thing that comes out of this increased exposure is the fact that China has just a lot more robots than America. A lot of America is focused on the digital version of AI, large language models. Whereas if you go to China, you see these — they're just starting to get rolled out, but there are these retail robots that help you order drinks. And if you go to classrooms in Beijing, you have students who are already using AI to study. When you interview them and you ask them about AI, their attitude toward AI is quite different from the average American. Because if you go to an American school, you interview a teacher, they might say something like, there's just so much cheating, there's rampant cheating, we gotta crack down on AI. That might be a view that you hear in America. But in China, the overwhelming majority are much more embracing of AI. And that attitude was reflected in this kind of period of the summit. That was really encouraging, I think.

The other aspect of AI that needs to be discussed is the bilateral discussions around AI, which is a really historic moment, because it was discussed in the Biden administration, but this is the first time during the Trump administration that this has been seriously discussed between the US and China. It has echoes to the Cold War around nuclear treaties between the Soviet Union and the United States. These are two countries with extremely powerful AI systems that are now discussing what they call, quote unquote, "guardrails." It was not clear in this summit what exactly those guardrails will entail. I think that there are discussions about some kind of crisis communication hotline, also very similar to the nuclear age. There's some discussions around — my guess is that there's gonna be some kind of way of reporting up and escalating up some kinds of misuses of large language models that may be shared between the two countries.

So all of that is really good, but we're still at the very early stage. We don't know what exactly these guardrails and protocols will look like. And when I talked to some of the AI safety people after the summit, one person said that it's kind of like a deferral from a college acceptance — you get deferred. And so you don't actually know the outcome. But I think that what the summit achieved was that it created a permission to discuss AI from the perspective of security and safety between the two countries, rather than as something that you need to win the competition with the other rival. Because that was the dominant narrative.

Ian Buruma: Do you think that is the way Xi Jinping sees things? Doesn't he in the end want China to really be in control? I also have two questions for you. One is to do with your own experience as a journalist in China. When you say that the New York Times and the Washington Post only have one person there — and I'm asking this out of ignorance — do they still have Chinese stringers who can fill in some of those gaps? Or has it become so difficult in Xi Jinping's China that most local Chinese wouldn't be able to, or want to, do that anymore?

The other question related to that is, why do you think it's encouraging that American journalists get a very superficial impression of Chinese prowess in AI and so on? Which may be a good thing — it wakes Americans up to the fact of how far China has come in this. But why do you think it's encouraging?

Chang Che: There are stringers. They still use stringers. But it's on the decline for a number of reasons, but one of them is just that the stringers are taking a lot more risk now, because China has like a notorious bias against Chinese people doing Western reportage. There's like an escalating tier of sensitivity, depending on your ethnicity, your nationality, your gender. When it comes to the security state in China, the worst you can be is a Chinese female journalist, reporter for Western outlets. If you're male and you're white, you're less sought after by the security state. So that's the answer to that.

Why is it encouraging? I think what you're asking is, is it encouraging because all of this is still very superficial, and it's a little bit stage-managed, right? You're not able to really get the — a good example of this is Bret Baier, the Fox News host, did a kind of example of the Chinese robots, right? And how good the Chinese robots are. And that's really, like, the first thing the Chinese want you to see when you go to China. It's not the political prisoners, it's not the censorship, it's the robots, right? So what do I think about that?

I — it is a — so you're right. I'm of the view that no knowledge is worse than a little bit of a biased view. Because the robots are a part of China. The robots are very technologically advanced. China is leading the world. That is true. It's a positive side. But I'd rather have Americans see one side that's true about China than to have no clue about China at all. Because — I had a conversation with Saagar Enjeti, one of the influencers who had visited China, and he told me that his friends thought China was like North Korea. And he's not talking to dissidents and he's not talking to political prisoners, which I think is sad. And it is something that I hope — we can't always get what we want, right? We can't get everyone to be able to see both sides of China. But for now, I am encouraged by having at least one side shown to the Americans.

Ian Buruma: But that brings me to something else that I've been thinking about for a long time, and it fascinates me. If you look at the history of relations between the Western world — and that's mostly Europe — and China, you see these constant swings between being over-awed — since Marco Polo, I think the 13th century — this idea of this civilization that is completely unknown but is vastly superior to anything else, and they have all these miraculous things in these great palaces and so on and so forth. There's this awe, which you found amongst intellectuals who thought that Maoist China was a kind of paradise on earth. And you found it, as I said, with somebody like Henry Kissinger — the mystique of China. And then it alternates with fear. This idea of the sleeping dragon, which one should never wake up, because it will then devour the world and so on and so forth.

The two are very linked. Both the fear and the awe are two sides of the same coin. When American journalists come back full of stories of these miraculous robots — and I was reading a French news magazine, L'Express, just now, with a long, rather good article about AI and how advanced China was — there was even a story, may be true, as far as I know, but in Shenzhen they now have drone taxis that fly people through there —

Chang Che: eVTOLs. They do.

Ian Buruma: So I could see how people come back again with this — the Marco Polo image of China. But it can very quickly flip into fear and hostility. So again, our entire conversation has been about double-edged things. This is also double-edged.

Chang Che: Yeah, it's certainly that fear and awe when it comes to the robotics and the technology is definitely apt, because the Europeans are at once awed by Chinese technology, and they're also grappling with a massive influx of Chinese technologies, specifically electric vehicles, into their markets. So they're dealing with a double-edged in real time, which is that these robotics and these technologies are so heavily subsidized by Chinese industrial policy that there's just no way to compete. So certainly it's a big issue. And there's a military component as well, right? When are these robots gonna come into — be used for the military? What are these drones and these flying drones — when AI-powered flying drones are gonna start going to the PLA, that's gonna be on the horizon.

Ian Buruma: So do you think that the United States is correct to try and limit the importation in the US of Chinese electrical vehicles? Is that the right policy, or should they let them in and try and compete?

Chang Che: I don't know. I don't have a strong opinion about that. But what it does remind me of was that there was a similar problem with the Japanese, right? There was a period, I think it was the '80s, when Reagan was grappling with this exact same question about, should we let the Japanese car companies into the United States? And at the time, Reagan decided to tariff the Japanese. He had this policy that was basically to put up a barrier for Japanese car companies. And the consensus is that it helped the American manufacturers. What ended up happening was that a lot of Japanese car companies, like Toyota, created their own American branches at the time. That's actually why I am speaking English, because my parents worked at Toyota. They moved — I don't know if people know that background, but I moved from Japan to the United States, because my parents were in the auto industry in Japan. And after these tariffs that came up, Japanese car companies started to manufacture these cars within the US to route around these regulations. And that was the reason why my parents were able to move to the United States.

Ian Buruma: People forget now that in the early 1980s, when this was an issue, you had US congressmen in front of the TV cameras taking the hammer to Japanese cars and sort of smashing the windows and showing that they were going to resist the economic invasion of Japan.

Chang Che: Exactly. That's what Biden did, right? Biden succumbed to the political pressure to basically protect the auto industry. I think that we're gonna have to see whether his tariffs and Trump's tariffs work. But I think that it's a little bit strange that we're in a very weird timeline where the point of these electric vehicle tariffs were to allow the American manufacturers to catch up in electric vehicles, but that's just not the direction that Trump wants them to go. And these automakers are not really heading in that direction. So it's a weird timeline. It's a little bit different from the '80s, where there was a kind of revival of car manufacturing in the United States.

Ian Buruma: We haven't really discussed yet — but this is being reported very much as a US-China visit, which it is, and something that concerns Americans and Chinese, but it deeply concerns the surrounding countries of China, and notably South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and then, by extension, a little bit further, Southeast Asia. We know that they've been looking at this summit with a considerable amount of worry.

Chang Che: Yeah, it's important to keep in mind that Takaichi, the Prime Minister of Japan, scheduled a meeting with Trump before the summit, specifically to preempt Trump's visit to the summit, and to make sure that they can get some guarantee that Trump's not gonna change anything on the Taiwan policy, which I think they got. But again, I think that the Japanese are looking at this the same way that we have sort of been discussing, right? There's a kind of — it's a blessing and a curse. It looks like Trump is pretty disciplined. Right? But he's also too transactional of a leader for the Japanese to be comfortable with him. How do you think the Japanese are thinking about this?

Ian Buruma: I think they're extremely worried. In the short run — not probably — the Japanese and the Koreans and the Taiwanese, there's a certain amount of relief. Could be worse. But the problem persists, in that they are very vulnerable, and they depend entirely for their security on the United States. And Takaichi, for one, is trying slowly to change that by making it constitutionally easier and to prepare Japanese public opinion for a more independent defense policy. But that'll take time — take much longer than the Trump administration. So my impression is that their intention right now is to play for time, then flatter Trump, hope that he won't do anything crazy, see out the next two years in hope of a more dependable US administration. But that doesn't solve the problem either, because it may even lull — that goes for the Europeans, too — it'll lull European countries and Japan and South Korea back to sleep. If a decent Democrat, maybe slightly hawkish Democrat, were to come to power, or even Marco Rubio, or somebody like him, who would reaffirm the American commitment to defend its allies and so on, the result could be that would slow down attempts such as what Takaichi is doing.

Chang Che: Do you actually think that, though? That's true that it would be more reassuring if Rubio were President, but it doesn't change the fact that the Chinese military and the nuclear arsenal is growing very rapidly.

Ian Buruma: Yes, I do think that. But it is a democracy, and she has to get public opinion behind the idea. But if the Japanese and Koreans could feel that they could depend on the United States a bit more than they do now, that could make that task a bit more difficult. That's all I'm saying. It's not going to change the fear of China.

Chang Che: This is just the beginning of another three years of relationships and interactions between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. It's not even the one interaction this year. They're gonna meet multiple times this year. Within those three years, you can imagine a lot of scenarios where Donald Trump needs the Chinese, the way that they needed this time with Hormuz and the strait. Right? They needed — Donald Trump doesn't admit this, and when he was interviewed about this, he constantly said, I didn't ask, we don't need China to help us unblock this strait. But you can imagine that he's a pretty reckless President. And he can get into scenarios where he needs the Chinese to cooperate. And the Chinese, if they're smart, they just wait for a time, and they have Trump's ear because of this summit. They just wait for a time when Trump needs something from them, and they just say, why don't you change your policy a little bit on Taiwan? Why don't you tweak your —

Ian Buruma: Why don't you tweak your language? That's a very good point. And that could have happened this time. Trump clearly did talk about Iran. We know that, because he mentioned that they discussed the Straits of Hormuz needing to be open. So it clearly came up, but Trump didn't get what he wanted. He didn't get a promise from the Chinese that they'd put pressure on Iran to open it. But I think you're absolutely right. The more Trump feels that he needs the Chinese to get him out of his own mess, the more likely it is that the Chinese will start putting more pressure on him to change his rhetoric on Taiwan. I think that's a real danger. And I'm sure that the Japanese and the Koreans and the Taiwanese are quite aware of that.

Chang Che: Great. Anything else?

Ian Buruma: No, I think that was a good conversation.