The Emperor Comes to Beijing — Without His Clothes

14 May 2026 By: Shahab MOSSAVAT When Donald Trump first touched down in Beijing in November 2017, Xi Jinping laid on the full theatre of imperial hospitality: a private dinner in the Forbidden City, a parade through Tiananmen Square, and the announcement of $250 billion in business deals – a figure so grand it dwarfed the entire annual GDP of West Virginia, where one of its headline memoranda of understanding was supposedly centred. Almost none of it materialised. The symbolism, however, was exquisitely chosen. China was telling the world – and telling Trump – who was truly in charge. Nine years on, the pageantry at Beijing Capital International Airport on Wednesday – the honour guard, the schoolchildren chanting in Mandarin, the skyscrapers lit with welcoming characters – carried an almost identical message, delivered with rather more pointed subtlety. Air Force One landed, and a US president who had spent his first term threatening to break China, and his second term actually trying to, stepped onto a red carpet laid by a nation that had absorbed his blows, weaponised its advantages in response, and emerged from the encounter structurally stronger. Donald Trump is greeted at Beijing airport by Chinese Vice President Han Zheng The shift in the bilateral power dynamic is not subtle. It is measurable, documented and, for Washington, deeply uncomfortable. When Trump arrived in 2017, the United States still held most of the conventional cards: it was the world’s pre-eminent consumer market, the anchor of the dollar-denominated global financial system, and the unchallenged custodian of the rules-based international order. China was formidable but still, in important respects, dependent – on American technology, American markets and American acquiescence. Trump’s instinct, brutal in its simplicity, was to exploit that dependency through tariffs. What he did not foresee was that a decade of patient strategic investment had quietly altered the underlying geometry. Consider the arithmetic of the current summit. Trump arrives in Beijing wanting concessions: market entry for American companies, Chinese purchases of Boeing aircraft and US soybeans, a softening of rare earth export restrictions that brought his own industrial economy to the edge of a supply crisis. Xi, by contrast, wants stability – time to consolidate a technological and industrial position that has already, by most independent assessments, reached escape velocity. The asymmetry is telling. One leader is shopping for wins to take home to voters ahead of bruising midterm elections. The other is managing a civilisational project measured in decades. Scott Kennedy, senior adviser and trustee chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, put it with characteristic precision in CNBC on the day the summit opened: “China comes into this meeting far more confident than in 2017, when it feared even a small rise in US tariffs. In the last year, Xi has been able to push back and neutralise much of Trump’s actions.” 2017 v 2026: Change in Body Language? Central to China’s structural advantage is its commanding position in the global shipping and logistics system – a dominance so comprehensive that it shapes the price of practically everything that moves by sea. By mid-2024, China had invested in ports in 16 of the top 20 nations for shipping connectivity. Roughly 27 per cent of global container trade now passes through terminals partly or wholly owned by Chinese or Hong Kong-based companies. In 2024 alone, China’s largest state-owned shipbuilder produced more commercial tonnage than the entire United States shipbuilding industry has delivered since the Second World War. Shanghai handled 51.5 million TEUs in 2024, making it the world’s busiest port – five times the throughput of Los Angeles and Long Beach combined. When China flexes its position in containerised freight, it is not merely adjusting a commercial variable. It is moving a lever that governs global commodity pricing across industries from automotive parts to pharmaceuticals, from agricultural produce to consumer electronics. The United States, which conducts the overwhelming majority of its trade by sea, sits downstream of that lever. Underpinning this logistical supremacy is a strategic energy architecture that took shape long before Trump’s tariff wars began. China’s early and consistent investment in Iranian crude – formalised in the 25-year, $400 billion cooperation agreement whose foundations Xi Jinping himself proposed during a 2016 visit to Tehran – secured access to oil trading at an $8–10 discount per barrel below global benchmarks. While Western economies lurched from one energy shock to the next, buffeted by sanctions regimes and geopolitical crises they themselves often authored, Beijing was buying Iranian crude at predictable, heavily discounted rates through independent refiners insulated from direct sanction exposure. More broadly, Xi’s decade-long programme of energy self-sufficiency – wind, solar, hydropower, domestic drilling and diversified import partnerships – has positioned China to weather disruptions that send other economies into crisis. The current US-Israel war against Iran, which has blockaded the Strait of Hormuz and sent global energy prices spiralling, is a case in point. China’s energy fortress, as analysts at Columbia University’s Centre on Global Energy Policy have noted, appears to be passing its sternest test. That cannot be said of the United States. Yangshan: The world’s busiest container port handling more than 50 million TEUs annually The technological transformation is perhaps the most significant shift of all. China is no longer, in any meaningful sense, the cheap-labour assembly floor of the global economy. Its “Made in China 2025” industrial strategy has delivered on its core promises with a thoroughness that has alarmed Western analysts. China now leads the world in industrial robotics installations, dominates the clean technology supply chain from lithium batteries to solar panels, and – with DeepSeek’s R1 model launching in early 2025 to international astonishment – has demonstrated serious, applied artificial intelligence capability that challenges American primacy in what was supposed to be a US-led domain. In rare earths, which sit at the chokepoint of every advanced technology from fighter jets to electric vehicles to AI semiconductors, Beijing controls 85–90 per cent of […]