The friendship between Trump and Xi is a boon for US-China relations, whatever the US media says
Chi Wang says the US president’s embrace of Xi Jinping’s welcome in Beijing reflects a personal warmth sorely missing in bilateral ties, bringing hope for more substantive cooperation to come
CNN reporters even claimed that “staging mattered as much as the policy”, or that Trump’s embrace of the welcome simply overshadowed anything else – completely overlooking that any “overshadowing” of policy was done by the media itself.
China has not had particularly positive perceptions of most US presidents past
The warm welcome Xi gave to Trump during his time in Beijing was indicative of both leaders’ desire for cooperation and friendship after years of cooling relations. Susan Rice, the former national security adviser to Barack Obama, criticised Trump for his “embarrassing accolades”, but for all her talk, Obama accomplished very little in China during his own time in office. He certainly lacked a cooperative relationship with Xi himself. Former Mexican ambassador to China Jorge Guajardo claimed Xi was “playing Trump like a fiddle”, but then admitted to having often been poor at reading his meetings in China himself. Other China academics, such as Bonnie Glaser with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, called it “flattery” that is unlikely to produce concrete progress for the US. Evan Medeiros, another former Asia adviser to Obama, suggested that Trump’s friendship with Xi might end up “inadvertently ceding American primacy” to China.
This is hyperbolic. It completely ignores the context of previous positive US-China relationships. Even Dennis Wilder, formerly the CIA’s deputy assistant director for East Asia and the Pacific, acknowledged that establishing personal ties “has been important in US-China relations ever since Mao [Zedong] and [Richard] Nixon”. And we know Nixon’s success in China was not simple lip service. Personal diplomacy works.