When Donald Trump meets his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at the US president’s Florida estate on Thursday and Friday, it will be another round of firsts: Not only will it be their first ever meetin
When Donald Trump meets his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at the US president’s Florida estate on Thursday and Friday, it will be another round of firsts:
Not only will it be their first ever meeting, it will also be the first time that a US president meets Beijing’s top leader so early in his presidency, not even two months after Trump’s inauguration.
Barack Obama met his Chinese colleague in the spring of 2009, early in his presidency, but that was a mere photo op at the margin of a G20 summit in London.
George W. Bush had his first China summit more than a year into his presidency.
Trump’s apparent rush to organize the high-level sit down has left China experts in Washington at a loss. “It is totally unclear what the US strategy toward China is”, says Christopher Johnson, a former China analyst at the CIA . “Right now we are unprepared for a summit and understaffed.”
Modern US-China summits go back to Richard Nixon’s presidency and have been top diplomatic events that were meticulously planned for months and months.
But those were the days when, on the American side, it was the State Department who was the main organizer of these meetings. In the Trump era, things are different.
In fact, it was Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner who single-handedly negotiated the details of the meeting.
Kushner and the Chinese ambassador, Cui Tiankai, have established a busy back channel during the early days of the Trump administration.
The two men agreed on Trump’s club, Mar-a-Lago, as the site for the meeting, and the ambassador even sent Kushner drafts of a joint statement that China and the United States could issue afterward, the New York Times has learned.
Kushner’s central role reflects not only the peculiar nature of this first meeting between Trump and Xi, but also of the broader relationship between the United States and China.
