The news is just filtering in that the US president will now be visiting China for two days—not three, as planned earlier—May 14-15. As usual, the announcement for the rescheduled itinerary of Trump’s long-awaited ‘Beijing tour’ has come from the White House and in a Truth Social post, while Beijing has typically neither confirmed nor denied the latest announcement in Washington of the visit. Interestingly, though at the official level Beijing may continue to wait for as long as it takes for Trump to arrive, Trump seems to have read the writing on the (Great) wall: “Trump is not welcome!” This is perhaps why the US president told the Financial Times on March 15: His [Trump’s] planned trip to China later this month could be delayed.
While the world media chose to interpret Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s statement welcoming Trump’s expected visit as “China wanting Donald Trump to come to Beijing despite the Iran war,” the public opinion in the People’s Republic makes an interesting contrast. Remember, addressing the international media during China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) session earlier this month, Wang Yi “indirectly” signaled that China remained “positive and open” about hosting President Trump. A strongly worded commentary on the widely read Chinese-language news platform gusncha.com—just a day after Wang Yi’s press conference—declared, “This may be the first time in 100 years that the world (especially China and the US) has such low expectations for a US president’s visits to major countries.”
Even reactions by the ordinary Chinese to the visit to Beijing by Trump have been “extraordinary.” A Chinese person commented in the reader’s chatroom, saying, “What would it mean to invite Trump to Beijing when the US and Israel are launching an invasion of Iran? Would it benefit Beijing’s international image?” Much before Trump announced an indefinite delay in his Beijing visit—no one in China has any illusion about the visit actually happening, now or later. This is despite Trump’s new itinerary saying his visit will take place in mid-May—a Chinese blogger posted that “He [Trump] won’t come if the fighting (in Iran) continues for another week. Or, if he hasn’t won by then, then what we said will be a slap in the face to him.”
As mentioned, and quite interestingly, following the US-Israeli military strikes on Iran on February 28, there have been rather intense and yet diverse and conflicting opinions circulating, especially among the Chinese strategic affairs community. On the one hand, these discussions are focused on the following issues: marked by hegemonic wars in Venezuela and Iran, respectively, the global situation has clearly entered a new stage in which the Trump-led United States is shaping a new global order. This emerging global order is the “American order,” and it is not “multipolar.” Second, will Iran survive this war? If it does, then it can completely break the US-Israel dominance in the Middle East and achieve a comprehensive upgrade in its political, economic, military, and security environment.
Third, experts in China agree the timing, the planning, and the strategic aim of attacking Iran by the United States have been flawed. There is widespread consensus among the Chinese scholars that the US has committed a blunder and the Iran War has become Trump’s “Ukraine War.” Citing reports and criticisms of the “Trumpian war” in the US media, several Chinese commentators have warned that if the war drags on and the US military casualties and economic costs continue to rise, Trump’s base support may crumble. With the Iran war entering its fifth week, almost everyone in China feels there is no way Trump can exit this quagmire gracefully. No wonder many in China have resorted to a famous ancient idiom to describe the situation Trump has put himself in: “He [Trump] is riding a tiger and doesn’t know how to dismount.”
The other focus of intense debates among Chinese analysts is the currently fraught China-US relations, especially the upcoming Trump visit to Beijing.
As mentioned, even before the US initiated an unprovoked war against Iran, a Chinese commentator openly advocated that Beijing “must firmly reject Trump’s request” to visit China. Describing Trump’s “eagerness” to visit China as blatant double-dealing, Li Guangman, an influential voice on foreign policy issues, wrote, “Recently, the United States has been simultaneously spreading rumors that Trump plans to visit China at the end of March while also targeting Chinese overseas assets globally.” Li was referring to a series of US actions directly targeting China’s overseas interests under the US strategy to contain China. On February 20, the US State Department abruptly revoked the visas of three Chilean officials, apparently to force the Chilean foreign ministry to stop the joint trans-Pacific submarine fiber optic cable project between China and Chile.
Furthermore, fearing that China will increase its influence in Latin America through port operations, on February 23, the US government pressured the Panamanian authorities to renege on the two ports’ management contracts awarded to the Hong Kong company C.K. Hutchison Holdings and banned all their Chinese employees from entering Panamanian ports. Earlier, on February 10, less than 48 hours after the new Dutch government took office, it announced taking full control of the semiconductor manufacturing firm Nexperia—a core global supplier of power devices and automotive-grade chips, 70-80% of whose production capacity is concentrated in China.
Li further argued that beginning in 2026, Trump simultaneously kept praising China and very shrewdly expressing his keen desire to make the “historic trip” to China and persisted with concrete actions aimed at harming China’s overseas interests. “From the Netherlands’ forced takeover of Nexperia, to Panama’s seizure of ports along the canal, to sanctions against Chilean officials and Australia’s intervention in the Port of Darwin, a series of events reveal the shadow of US-led geopolitical maneuvering. In essence, these events are a concentrated manifestation of the US and its allies systematically and deliberately eroding China’s overseas interests through a combination of political intervention, legal coercion, and public opinion manipulation. The aim is to curb the expansion of China’s global influence and maintain its own hegemonic status,” Li observed.
This above all refers to how the Trump-led US administration had been proactively “striking” at China overseas, beginning with the regime change in Venezuela but before the military action in Iran.
Reacting strongly to Trump’s attempt to “blackmail” China in an interview with the Financial Times, in which the US president demanded China join the US-led alliance to keep the Strait of Hormuz “secure and open” in exchange for Trump’s visit to China, a Chinese commentary described the proposed Xi-Trump summit as a meeting between “gentlemen and scoundrels.” Lamenting Trump’s cunning “diplomacy,” the commentary further ridiculed all those awaiting with enthusiasm the visit by the US president. “At this critical juncture in the Iran conflict, with the US and Israel locked in a stalemate, allowing Trump to visit China as scheduled would be detrimental to China,” it added. [Emphasis added]
In conclusion, notwithstanding the official stance of the PRC government that under the spirit of “head-of-state” diplomacy, it’s always better to hold summit talks, the mood in China—as reflected on social media and in academia—is not at all in favor of a visit by Trump to the Chinese capital. There is zero enthusiasm for the visit and very low expectation from it. Scholars in China have bluntly expressed that China must abandon its illusions, maintain strategic composure, and not be deceived by Trump’s honeyed words and treacherous intentions. Now that Trump himself has rescheduled his visit to Beijing by several weeks, a Chinese scholar has commented, “Postponing or canceling Trump’s visit to China is beneficial to China.”
