Trump faces 'king of China'

WHO’S GREAT AGAIN?

BEIJING — Xi Jinping and Donald Trump have one thing in common – they both want to make their nations great again. But while China's leader is on the rise, the US president arrives in Beijing laden down with heavy baggage.

Xi will roll out the red carpet for Trump when his fivenation Asia tour takes him to China on Wednesday, bringing the leaders of the world's toptwo economies together for the third time this year.

While Trump has made a show of his dominance over other world figures with his notoriously firm handshake, Xi has been determinedly strengthening his grip on power at home.

Chinese vice foreign minister Zheng Zeguang said last week that the visit "will have special significance," vowing to make it "historic".

The two leaders profess to have struck up a friendship since their first meeting at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in April, even as they tussle over trade and how to handle North Korea.

They also share a similar aspirational nationalism: Trump wants to "make-American great again" while Xi has sworn to realise the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation".

Xi, however, has undergone what even Trump has described as an "extraordinary elevation", saying "some people might call him the king of China."

Trump's visit is the first by a head of state since Xi's name was engraved in the Communist Party's constitution last month -rendering him China's most powerful leader since Chairman Mao Zedong.

The US president, on the other hand, is in an increasingly tenuous position with the lowest approval rating for a president in seven decades, and dogged by a probe into his election campaign's possible collusion with Russia.

"The financial crisis of 2009 and then this teeming disarray of the Trump White House have all added to a Chinese confidence and even arrogance that at last their moment has come," Orville Schell, an expert on US-China relations at the Asia Society, told AFP.

Xi is "ginned up on Chinese wealth and power, and it will disincline him to make compromises."

AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE Photographs of Chinese President Xi Jinping, US President Donald Trump, and former US president Barack Obama are on display in a photo shop in Beijing, ahead of Trump’s visit.