The Guardian View on Trump and Xi: A Show of Friendship, but Little Progress on Tensions

A Guardian editorial argues that a recent meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping produced friendly gestures but did little to address the substantive tensions that continue to define the US-China relationship.

According to the editorial, Xi's visit to Washington included a lavish welcome from Trump, who reportedly travelled to greet Xi off his plane and said the two leaders had "never gotten along better." One of the tangible outcomes highlighted from the visit involved pandas: Beijing is set to send a pair, named Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, to be hosted at Atlanta Zoo, continuing a practice China has used since 1972, following President Richard Nixon's landmark visit, to signal satisfaction or displeasure with other nations through the loan of the animals — arrangements that reportedly involve a lease fee of around a million dollars a year per pair.

The editorial contends that this panda announcement was one of the main tangible takeaways from Xi's Washington visit, a detail it frames as reflecting the limited substance of the meeting's outcomes. It notes that expectations for the summit were already low following a stalemate reached at an earlier meeting between the two leaders in Beijing in May, and argues that this latest encounter still struggled to meet even those reduced expectations.

Limited Shift in Public Sentiment

The editorial observes that American public attitudes toward China have warmed somewhat since a low point during the pandemic, but argues this shift is unlikely to be significantly influenced by symbolic gestures such as the panda loan, however well received the animals may be. It characterises such gestures as more of a token gesture today than the striking symbol they once represented.

Within days of the editorial's publication, two additional high-profile Chinese visitors were expected to arrive in the United States, described in the piece as further envoys of the friendship Xi described when meeting Trump at the White House. The editorial's overall assessment is that, despite the warm optics of the meeting, no real progress was made on resolving the substantive tensions in the bilateral relationship.