EXPERT INTERVIEW – For the past week, China has been holding annual government meetings known as the “Two Sessions,” which bring more than 5,000 political figures to Beijing for conversations about an agenda for the nation's economic and foreign policy future. China’s leaders spent much of the 2025 edition unveiling plans to reboot a stagnant economy and transform the country into a technological powerhouse.
The words “Donald Trump” did not appear in public pronouncements, but the Trump Administration’s threats against China and the tariffs it has imposed hung over the gathering. So did the possibility of deal-making, or at least some negotiating to put the U.S.-China relationship on better footing. As the Two Sessions were wrapping up, there were reports that China and the U.S. have discussed a possible “birthday summit” in June – the month when President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping both celebrate their birthdays. President Trump has signaled a willingness to meet the Chinese leader – and he took the unprecedented step of inviting him to his second inaugural (Xi declined the invitation).
With so much attention on the warming relationship between the U.S. and Russia – and the prospects of a Trump meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin – the news is a reminder that the U.S.-China relationship is the more consequential one.
The stirrings of a possible Trump-Xi summit, and the conclusion of the “Two Sessions” gathering, come as the U.S.-China relationship is on rough ground. The Trump administration has imposed significant tariffs and trade restrictions against Beijing, and threatened more – and China has retaliated. A bipartisan consensus in Washington has emerged around the view that China represents the greatest long term threat to the U.S.; China has been blamed for cyberattacks against the U.S., covert influence campaigns, and an aggressive regional military buildup involving the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.
The Cipher Brief spoke about the Two Sessions gathering and many of these issues with Neil Thomas, a Fellow on Chinese Politics at the Asia Society’s Center for China Analysis. "We are seeing Beijing start to push back a bit against the Trump administration's policy," Thomas said. "Beijing is trying to walk a delicate balance between not provoking Trump into further escalation, but also signaling resolve that they can cause pain for the United States if they're pushed too far.”
Thomas spoke with Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can also watch their full discussion on The Cipher Brief YouTube channel.
The Cipher Brief: You wrote the other day that the annual “Two Sessions” is the closest thing to a carnival in Chinese politics. Can you help our audience understand a bit about what's going on there?
Thomas: It's the closest thing to a carnival, but it's probably not very carnival-esque by Western political standards. Between five and 6,000 delegates to China's main political advisory body, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and then delegates to China's parliament, the National People's Congress meet for about a week in Beijing in early March every year. And so you get people coming to these gatherings from all across China, from the military, business people, celebrities, tech titans – they all descend on Beijing for a week of political speeches and discussion sessions. There's a lot of ceremony but it's mostly important because the premier Li Qiang, the number-two official in China, delivers a government work report which sets out the economic targets and policy priorities for the government in the year ahead.
The Cipher Brief: What have been the main messages thus far, whether from Li's speech, or Wang Yi, the Foreign Minister, who spoke as well?
Thomas: The major theme I detected from Wang Yi was the argument that China is a stable force in international affairs. Whatever the United States might be doing, breaking its commitments or changing how it approaches alliances, withdrawing from global governance institutions – China is going to stay the course. It's committed to these multilateral forums. It's committed to economic globalization and free trade and foreign investment in a way that is still seen as very beneficial by Xi Jinping and Chinese leaders, but which the United States has really retreated from since the first Trump administration.
And you can debate whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but for a lot of other countries in the world, they still do have this preference for globalization, especially in the developing world. And China really wants to take advantage of that to impress its own claims to be a global leader.
The Cipher Brief: The phrase they used was, “We offer certainty, which is scarce at the moment.” And while this is a domestic gathering,was that a message that Wang Yi was giving to the rest of the world?
Thomas: Exactly. It's also a message he's giving to the Chinese political system. And that's a message that I think is coming from the very top, from President Xi himself. And that message also represents a brave face that's covering up a lot of concern and uncertainty in Beijing about the return of Trump to the White House. There's this bold rhetoric coming out of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and particularly the [Chinese] Embassy in the U.S., which is saying that China's ready for a trade war, or any other type of war that the United States might want. But we've seen pretty consistent language since Trump's election that the external environment is getting worse, and that more geopolitical volatility is coming, which is going to put pressure on trade and technology and other strengths of the Chinese economy in recent years. So my view is that Beijing's leadership is very concerned about this and is going to do all it can to try and avoid a big conflagration in a U.S.-China trade war. And that's why we've seen a slightly restrained retaliation to the 10 % and then extra 10 % of tariffs that Trump has introduced since January.
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The Cipher Brief: And to your point about what this may be masking, China is suffering weak growth, not much foreign investment coming in, a low birth rate – it’s already a fairly long list of Chinese domestic troubles, before you get to the trade war, is that right?
Thomas: That's right. It might be the case that tariffs and the trade war are not existential for China. They're not the number-one priority of economic policymakers, and China is better prepared than it was eight years ago when Trump first came onto the scene. But it is one of many worries that are facing Xi and his top economic people. We've seen more stimulus coming in the form of lower-interest rates and other monetary policy adjustments, and we've seen a record level of deficit spending and fiscal stimulus in the annual plan. And even though it's a record level of stimulus, it actually undershot some of the expectations that economists had coming into the Two Sessions. And I think that's because, A, there's some debt concerns about sustainability, but B, Beijing is storing up some of its fiscal firepower in the case of a big escalation in the U.S.-China trade war. They want to have fiscal reserves ready to deploy at a moment's notice if they wake up to a tweet that announces a 60% across-the-board tariff, for example, which Trump promised ahead of the election.
The Cipher Brief: Wang Yi also said something that seemed like a pretty direct jab at not just the U.S., but the Trump administration. “Great powers should not be profit oriented, let alone bullying.” That's not olive-branch kind of language, is it?
Thomas: We are seeing Beijing start to push back a bit against the Trump administration's policy. Wang Yi also highlighted the tariffs in response to fentanyl failures identified by Trump, as being something that was totally unjustified. Beijing is trying to walk a delicate balance between not provoking Trump into further escalation, but also signaling resolve that they can cause pain for the United States if they're pushed too far. And we've seen them basically copy the American approach to export controls and unreliable entity lists in terms of economic diplomacy. So they've begun to start adding a few more American companies to those lists in the last couple of months. Nothing that’s going to have a massive effect on the American economy just yet. But if they go further and start adding hundreds of American companies to these lists or some really big names in the U.S.-China relationship, then that could start really hurting in the U.S. as well as in China.
The Cipher Brief: I want to get your take on what we've seen vis-a-vis the Trump pivot to Russia and its impact on China: on the one hand, there's a concern voiced by some that the Trump administration has pivoted towards Russia, seemingly at the expense of its longtime ally, Ukraine, and that something similar may be in the works for Taiwan, because Trump fancies a big deal with Xi Jinping. On the other hand, there's a view that Trump is reaching out to Russia as a way to kind of cleave Russia away from China – that it’s an anti-China move. How do you read that?
Thomas: We have some signs we can work with right now. When it comes to Taiwan, I think the chances of Trump trading it away in some grand bargain with China are pretty low, because the big difference between Taiwan and Ukraine is semiconductors. Taiwan has most of the world's supply chains for advanced chips and Trump won't want that going into Chinese hands. He'd much rather it was in American hands, and that's why we see TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company] and these big chip fabs making huge investments in the United States, and the Trump administration trying to incentivize them to move more production outside of Taiwan. That will take years or decades if it even gets to that point. So I think Taiwan is going to be fine from that perspective.
When it comes to the China-Russia relationship, you're right that Chinese elites are skeptical about the American pivot towards Russia. They're wary of whether Putin might decide to lean more towards Washington than Beijing. But when it comes down to brass tacks, the economic relationship, the political relationship, the ideological convergence is still much stronger between
China and Russia than it is between Russia and the United States. So I can't see any signs of a split between Putin and Xi, particularly as they personally have a really strong relationship. And we've seen Putin briefing Xi right after his meetings with Trump on Ukraine. And there's already been two leader-level calls since Trump's inauguration.
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The Cipher Brief: At a recent Council on Foreign Relations event, one of the panel members said that many things the Trump administration has done thus far are good for China - in particular, the rupturing or with our European allies, and the end to funding for a lot of USAID programs in places where the Chinese can move in. Are there advantages for the Chinese in some of the early things that the Trump administration has done?
Thomas: Yes. To the extent that Trump's actions lead to a withdrawal of America's global presence, to a weakening of American alliances, to a fracturing of global governance, perhaps, that is going to create a more multipolar world, which has been an explicit objective of Chinese foreign policy for decades now.
But the other thing on that point is that we shouldn't underestimate the demand from allies and partners for continued American engagement, especially from those in the region. I'm thinking about Australia, where I'm from, or Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. There may be a lot of friction in their relations with the Trump administration, but there's also a recognition that the alternative to giving up on the U.S. is China being able to play a much more predominant role. And that's something that is an even lower preference for them than having to deal with a Trump administration in the United States. So I think that those ties between America and the world will certainly become more difficult, but I don't think any allies and partners actually want to see them break.
So they'll do what they can to keep relations alive, and they'll do what they can to keep on the right side of the Trump administration up to a certain point. So it's not going to be quite as much of a break, perhaps, as some of the commentary suggests.
The Cipher Brief: We know that Donald Trump likes personal interaction with leaders, powerful leaders especially, perhaps, and he has a penchant for the big deal. What odds do you put on a meaningful Trump-Xi engagement sometime soon and where might that lead?
Thomas: It's hard to say. There has been talk about a Trump-Xi meeting in the first hundred days, which means it would have to happen by the end of April. Trump has been invited to visit Japan in that window. And if he accepts, then that would be an obvious occasion to visit China as well. If that doesn't happen, then I think looking later into the year, we have the 80th anniversary of the UN General Assembly. The UN is a really central pillar of Chinese foreign policy. It's the type of anniversary that Xi Jinping himself would usually travel for, to give a big speech at UNGA. And that's in New York. So it's a relatively low risk way for Xi Jinping to travel the United States, and while he's there, to go to Trump Tower, perhaps, or maybe to fly to Mar-a-Lago and have a face-to-face meeting with Trump to try and get this relationship into deal-making mode. That is seen as advantageous by Beijing because — at least in the first administration — once they got past the first trade war and got into the room together, that process did affect Trump's thinking about the desirability of more tariffs, more export controls, more measures against China, because those could get in the way of deal-making.
So I think they will get in the room together, almost certainly at some point this year. But there's a lot of X factors there. If there is an escalation of the trade war, if there is a sudden move on Taiwan policy in the United States, that could all complicate the picture and make it a lot more difficult for Xi Jinping to get to the table.
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