David Gardner writes:

Donald Trump will leave China a chastened man.

If he didn’t know what Xi Jinping meant by raising the specter of the Thucydides Trap when he arrived in Beijing, you can be sure that he does now.

Because it was a warning issued by a leader who is very much Trump’s equal in power and way more experienced at using it.

Amid the pomp of Trump’s arrival on Thursday, Xi invoked a classical Greek reference suggesting that war is often inevitable when a rising power challenges a hegemon.

It’s a relatively modern concept based around the historian Thucydides’s quote about the second Peloponnesian War (431 B.C. to 404 B.C.): “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”

The Western view has Sparta as the United States and China as the upstart Athens. Xi may see it differently.

While the People’s Republic of China was officially founded on October 1, 1949, its cultural roots extend 3,500 to 3,700 years back to the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600 BCE). At 250 years old, the U.S. is just a baby.

Trump is consumed with manipulating the markets on Fox News. Xi sees power in terms of centuries rather than news cycles.

Up to now, China has treated Trump with kid gloves. But as a sophisticated anathema to the fast-talking, knee-jerk Trump, Xi has taken off the gloves this week, hinting at the power at his fingertips.

And Trump looks shaken. [Continue reading…]

David Sanger writes:

For President Trump, the first day of his visit to Beijing was all about the personal relationship between him and Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader.

“You’re a great leader,” he told his host, whom he has often said he admires for his “powerful” control over a nation of 1.4 billion people. “I say it to everybody.”

Mr. Xi, unsurprisingly, spent little time Thursday on flattery. Once the 21-gun salute and precision-marching by units of the People’s Liberation Army were finished, the disciplined Chinese leader plunged right away into setting boundaries for the two country’s relations. The red line was Taiwan, he said, making it abundantly clear that Mr. Trump’s effort at rapprochement could crash on takeoff if he interferes with China’s long-term effort to take control of the self-governing island.

“The U.S. must handle the Taiwan issue with utmost caution,” he said according to a readout from Xinhua, China’s official news agency. The warning came just minutes into his public remarks in the Great Hall of the People, the center of power for the People’s Republic starting just a decade into Mao’s revolution. For Mr. Xi, it was all about setting boundaries, from the start.

The moment seemed to capture the new equilibrium between the two adversaries. Mr. Xi arrived highly scripted, leaving no doubt that for all of China’s problems — deflation, depopulation, the bursting of the real estate bubble — the moment when China acts as a peer superpower had arrived. [Continue reading…]