President Donald Trump’s high-stakes visit to China this week marks nearly a decade since a sitting U.S. president — in this case, Trump himself — traveled there to meet with Xi Jinping, president of the People’s Republic of China, or PRC.
While the trip is expected to touch on a broad range of issues that have divided the two powers in recent years — from U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports and trade and competition in technology manufacturing to Beijing’s ambitions toward Taiwan and growing military tensions in the Indo-Pacific — experts are tuning in to see if the U.S. will call on China to help with the ongoing conflict in Iran.
“I think the Iran war has complicated the usual assumption that the U.S. automatically holds more leverage globally,” said Xiaoxiao Shen, an assistant research professor of political science at Northeastern. “Militarily, of course, the United States still has unmatched power projection. But the crisis also revealed how much the global economy depends on China’s position in supply chains, manufacturing and energy markets.”
Others also agree with that assessment.
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The most pressing concern for Kellee Tsai, a political scientist and dean of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, might be the U.S.’s attempt to “enlist China to lean on Iran to re-open the Strait of Hormuz,” the restrictions upon which have precipitated a global energy crisis that is spiking gasoline and inflation in the U.S.
Beijing has recently sought to cast itself as a key diplomatic broker on the world stage, including helping facilitate a 2023 rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Because of China’s close economic relationship with Iran, including its role as a major buyer of Iranian oil, experts say it could be uniquely positioned to pressure Iran toward de-escalation and renewed negotiations with the U.S.
This doesn’t necessarily give China the upper hand, Shen said. “Gulf instability is risky for Beijing as well because China depends heavily on imported energy and stable shipping routes. So the war has not necessarily shifted power decisively toward either side.”
Tsai said Trump is likely approaching the summit with a desire to emerge with “successive deals” he can frame as diplomatic and economic victories, whether on trade, energy stability or the war, but added that expectations of any sweeping reset in relations may be overstated.
“The political and media hype leading up to this visit also implies that it could herald a thawing in US-China tensions, possibly akin to [President Richard] Nixon’s visit to China in 1972,” she said.
While the U.S. has not been estranged from China the way it was prior to Nixon’s 1972 visit to the country, the two nations have remained deeply economically intertwined — even as political and strategic tensions have intensified, Tsai noted. “Instead, mutual suspicion and economic securitization over the past decade has compromised the liberal international economic order that benefited both countries for roughly 25 years,” she said.
For Shen, the summit further illustrates the difficulty of disentangling “the economic issues from the security issues” that have shaped the U.S.-China relationship over that time.
That fundamental linkage is particularly striking given that over the past decade, China has positioned itself as a global superpower capable of rivaling the U.S. economically and militarily. A nation of more than 1.4 billion people, China has expanded its influence through massive international infrastructure investments under its Belt and Road Initiative, while also rapidly modernizing its military and asserting itself more aggressively in the South China Sea and around Taiwan.
Recently, however, as semiconductor manufacturing and access to artificial intelligence and advanced computing have come to define relations between the powers, the U.S. and China have spent years imposing export controls, including tit-for-tat tariffs and restrictions on international investments, with the intention of shoring up domestic industries and limiting the other’s technological influence, the experts say.
As a result, she said that over the last few years, the relationship has become “much more about managing vulnerability and dependence” than simply expanding trade, Shen said.
“Energy flows, shipping routes, semiconductors and regional conflicts are now all tied together in ways they were not even a decade ago,” Shen said. “So what I will be paying attention to is less whether there is some big ‘deal,’ and more whether the two sides signal that they still want to put limits around escalation.”
Ultimately, such high-level visits from American presidents more and more reflect a near-universal recognition of China’s growing clout.
“The world is watching,” Tsai said. “The fact that Trump is travelling all the way to China suggests a combination of implicit acknowledgement and respect for China’s status as a significant economic and political player in international relations.”