View / Trump and the CEOs go to China

There’s a line you hear from representatives and admirers of the Chinese Communist Party, the Gulf monarchies, and other ascendant, authoritarian powers: We’re so lucky to have wise leaders who can set a stable course for the long term, while your democracy, with its chaotic elections and unpredictable leaders — cue a look of pity — makes it impossible to plan at all.

As President Donald Trump heads to Beijing for this week’s low-expectations summit, that sentiment is everywhere. On the Chinese side, health expert Yanzhong Huang writes of “a dangerous new overconfidence taking hold in my native country based on misplaced notions of American decline.”

In Washington, a carefully constructed decade of political consensus on China policy lies in ruins.

Starting in the first Trump administration, leaders of both parties converged around a worldview crystallized by former GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher’s select committee on China in 2023 and 2024: The US should reverse the mistakes of past decades, drag its supply chains out of China, and enact a careful and systematic embargo on sensitive technologies and particularly silicon chips.

That consensus exploded just as it seemed to have been working. Chinese AI labs struggled to keep up with their chip-rich US competitors. But while many of Trump’s aides buy the hawkish Washington China consensus, one administration official is more flexible, and he’s the only one who counts. So Trump swung around to Nvidia’s case for selling more chips to China.

Now Gallagher works for Palantir. Cynics always thought that the anti-China turn in US politics was driven by big American business looking to kneecap competitors (Meta warning of the dangers of TikTok) or beg for bailouts (a la Intel).

But the tendency to let commercial interests drive American foreign policy is as old as the first US adventure abroad, against the Barbary pirates 200 years ago. What’s new, if anything, is that some in Washington, encouraged by opportunistic business leaders, have lost the courage of their commercial convictions — and now gaze admiringly on autocratic regimes that believe their leaders can out-plan the market.

The Trump administration, Liz Hoffman scooped last week, invited CEOs of companies that would benefit, broadly, from an open door to China — Nvidia, Apple, Exxon, Boeing, Qualcomm, Blackstone, Citigroup, and Visa — to join him in Beijing next week. Big American business is far from unanimous, of course. Auto manufacturers and many others seek protection from China. And there may be different approaches across sectors. But in Donald Trump’s personalist Washington, these big American companies — with the possibility they bring of big deals and big investments — tend to drive policy far more than any broader strategy or ideology.

The headlines this time around promise a new era of managed trade, headed by a “board of trade” in which the US government exercises new leverage over the bilateral commercial relationship. And some Trump aides are pushing hard to make that happen. The Chinese and US companies may be skeptical, however, that this innovation will survive the 2028 US elections and the messiness of US democracy.