Trump and Xi: 2 imposing leaders with clashing agendas

At odds over several issues, heads of state to meet today.

BEIJING — When President Xi Jinping of China arrives at President Donald Trump’s Florida estate Thursday, his goal will be to get through the quick visit looking like a resolute leader who can hold his own against the U.S. president, something that even some of Washington’s closest allies have failed to pull off.

Xi wants to show his domestic audience that he can manage the relationship with Trump and avert a crisis in relations with the United States, a message that would strengthen his hand in the jockeying for power before a Communist Party leadership congress later this year.

But while the meetings could lift Xi’s stature at home, they also present significant risks. The two men are at odds on several contentious issues, and perhaps no Chinese leader has ever walked into a meeting with a U.S. president like Trump, who has shown a disdain for the language of diplomacy. Xi has a highly scripted style, and the Chinese are accustomed to meetings that are tightly choreographed.

Events began to veer off script Wednesday as North Korea fired an intermediate range ballistic missile into waters off its east coast, a defiant move that seemed intended to exacerbate differences between Trump and Xi.

Xi is likely to play down potential conflicts, offering vague assurances on trade and North Korea’s nuclear provocations that he believes Trump will want to hear but that may not amount to significant policy changes. At the same time, however, he will not want to look as if he is backing down or being lectured. For the Chinese, the atmospherics of the talks will be as important as the substance.

“How to deal with Trump is a test of statesmanship,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “Success is very important.”

Trump and Xi may seem like polar opposites when it comes to temperament, but they are both imposing men with ambitious and at times clashing agendas.

Xi runs an authoritarian government led by a Communist Party determined to drive China’s economy past that of the United States to become the world’s biggest. He relies on rigid decorum and a secretive inner sanctum of aides to project power. To squelch dissent in the past few years, he has ordered severe limits on the Chinese people’s access to the internet.

Trump, unpredictable and a neophyte to diplomacy, has pledged to put “America First,” in part by stalling China’s rise and forcing it to the bargaining table on trade. Twitter is inaccessible in China, but the Chinese are rattled by Trump’s habit of making brash statements on the internet.

Yet Chinese analysts say Xi enters the meetings, beginning Thursday afternoon, confident that he can stave off an eruption on the two biggest issues: North Korea and trade.

Xi is prepared for Trump to press for more economic punishment against North Korea for its expanding nuclear weapons program and will offer to bear down on the North, an ally of China’s, Shi said.

But, he added, the Chinese leader is expected to cleave to a strategic bottom line: North Korea must serve as a buffer zone against the potential of a unified Korean Peninsula dominated by the U.S. military.

Before Xi’s arrival, Trump upped the ante, telling The Financial Times last weekend that China had “to help us with North Korea.” If Xi failed to do so, Trump said, the United States would take unilateral action.

Adding to tensions were signs last week in North Korea of intensified activities at its Punggye-ri underground test site.

The preparations could be for an audacious test to disrupt the talks, experts said. But it was more likely that a test was aimed for April 15, an important national anniversary in North Korea. That timing would also embarrass Xi just fresh from his Florida meetings.

Xi appeared to be satisfied he could head off Trump’s campaign threats of calling China a currency manipulator and imposing heavy tariffs on Chinese imports to the United States, Chinese officials said.

If Trump made these moves, the Chinese state media said, China would be ready with reprisals: ending purchases of grains from the heartland, ordering passenger aircraft from Airbus instead of Boeing and clamping down on the sales of American microchips and phones.

But as the Florida trip has gotten closer, China has become more nervous.

Top Chinese officials have been closely gauging Trump’s domestic fortunes as a barometer of the president’s mood when the talks open.

By their calculation Trump’s poor poll ratings, the investigations into his campaign’s connections with Russia and the failure of his health care legislation are not necessarily beneficial for Xi.

On the eve of the scheduled vote on the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, an American economist, Eswar Prasad, said he dropped in on Chinese colleagues who were gaming out Xi’s economic proposals for Florida.

Prasad said he was surprised to find that the Chinese economists were obsessed with tracking Trump’s fortunes in the congressional vote. For example, they knew exactly how many votes the Freedom Caucus had mustered, he said.

“They were saying they wanted the vote to go Trump’s way because then Trump would be less tempted to take it out on China,” said Prasad, an economist at Cornell. Trump suffered a big legislative defeat, the opposite of what they hoped for.