Beijing: When Donald Trump swings into China for the APEC summit this month it will be as a wounded figure, his party thoroughly routed at home and his MAGA movement facing a biblical reckoning.
Domestic political verdicts don’t necessarily translate to policy shifts on the world stage but they can cast a long shadow.
Against the backdrop of Republican incineration at the midterms, Trump is expected to sit down with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Shenzhen during the November 18-19 summit. The meeting would be historic, if unnerving for Washington’s allies alarmed at Trump’s admiration for his rivals.
Beijing, too, is wary of being cast as a great power carving up spheres of influence and redrawing maps around a negotiating table, an image that contradicts its solidarity pitch to the Global South as the shared losers of last century’s power dynamics.
The agenda could be unruly, spanning the Ukraine war, Iran war and trade.
Putin proposed it. Trump is open to it. This leaves Xi holding the cards as to whether he will agree to host it. China’s foreign ministry has confirmed discussions are under way.
“It is very likely to happen,” says Wu Xinbo, the director of the Centre for American Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University, who advises China’s foreign ministry.
“It shows the convening power of China’s diplomacy.”
At the same time, Beijing is now weighing up what impact a domestically hobbled Trump could have on US-China relations and global affairs generally over the remaining two years of his term.
In Trump’s first term, after Republicans lost the House at the midterms, he doubled down on a hawkish China agenda, escalating tariffs and export controls on technology and campaigning against the “China virus” as part of his failed 2020 re-election bid.
A common view among Chinese scholars this time around is that a lame-duck president at home could prove a legacy-building president abroad, seeking to lock in foreign policy “wins”.
“Trump’s incentive to seek a political legacy through diplomacy increases,” says Zhao Minghao, also at Fudan University, where he is a specialist in Sino-US relations.
“This could actually create some space for stabilising China-US relations. The Democratic-controlled Congress may launch investigations, pass resolutions on Taiwan or trade, and create diplomatic friction — but these actions are unlikely to fundamentally alter the trajectory.”
Others are less convinced. George Chen, from The Asia Group consultancy firm headquartered in Washington, sees the potential for a Democratic Congress to become the biggest source of instability in an otherwise stable Trump-Xi relationship.
The most volatile pressure point is Taiwan, Beijing’s self-identified reddest of red lines, which Congress could challenge by pushing for fast-tracked arms deliveries to Taiwan, and more official exchanges and high-level engagement with Taipei.
“If Congress chooses to become more assertive on Taiwan, Beijing will eventually face a difficult choice: absorb those political signals in the interest of preserving broader stability, or respond forcefully and risk undermining that stability itself,” Chen wrote this week.
Xi, of course, never has to face voters who might otherwise have something to say, if given the chance in genuinely competitive elections, about the country’s tepid domestic economy — with its low wages, limited job opportunities and threadbare safety net.
Telling the country to “eat bitterness” while they ride out the tough times, as the Chinese president has done, is not a rhetorical luxury Western leaders can lean on as they try to placate voter fury over rising interest rates, oil prices and cost-of-living pressures.
But Xi is not totally immune from political pressure. He is widely expected to seek a fourth term as leader at the Communist Party’s 21st Congress next year, and must make his case for why he is worthy of power unmatched in scale since the Mao era.
Xi has been on a diplomatic gallop this year, projecting China as a stable superpower and partner to an array of world leaders who have passed through Beijing, invariably inviting them to draw a comparison with American ambivalence under Trump and the chaos of his self-inflicted Iran war.
Corralling Putin and Trump into a room will help burnish China’s self-styled image as global peacemaker – one Beijing has claimed despite rarely wanting to get its hands dirty in the grit of conflict resolution (all the while aggressively policing the South China Sea and threatening Taiwan).
If, and when, the trio sit down, Xi will be the only one of three men who has not actively steered his country into war.
Putin wants a way out of Ukraine. Trump wants a way out Iran, and may again appeal for Beijing to help secure it. Trump says he wants to talk about denuclearisation. He could seek Putin and Xi’s support in teeing up the meeting he’s determined to have with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Picking through these complex issues in pursuit of some kind of “grand bargain” is a challenge beyond any single meeting. The three sides hold historical suspicions towards one another that run deeper than any sense of bonhomie the three men may like to project.
Unquestionably, the dynamics are stacked in favour of Putin and Xi, bonded in their disdain for the US-centric global system. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky is understandably concerned.
Chances are it proves little more than a photo op that benefits Xi the most and Trump the least.
Chance are US allies will see that as the best-case outcome.
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
Lisa Visentin is the North Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age based in Beijing. She was previously a federal political correspondent based in Canberra.Connect via X or email.
