Donald Trump invites Chinese President Xi Jinping!

President Elect Donald Trump has invited Chinese President Xi Jinping for his inauguration on January 20, but the deafening silence from Beijing is being perceived as a big “snub” to Trump, who seems to be making an opening chess over in a pan pacific great game built to define his 2nd term in the White house. Trump’s unorthodox approach may be starting to ruffle feathers in Beijing. Viewed against this move
Trump appears to fantasize and his invite to Xi Jinping, breaks with tradition and protocols, and he expected to make a global statement with his presence at his inauguration. Apparently having him at his oath taking was a calculated move by Trump to decouple China, the biggest trading partner of US, from hostile nations such as Iran, Russia, and North Korea.
What is intriguing is that how did Donald Trump expect first Xi Jinping to attend when he had announced he would first impose 60% tariff on Chinese goods and then later revised it to say that he would impose an additional 25% tariffs on Chinese imports. Trump had also announced that he would impose 10 to 20% tariffs on goods imported from Mexico and Canada in an effort to what he called an attempt to cross border migrations and smuggling of substances such as cocaine and Fentanyl that were causing over 100,000 deaths a year in the US due to drug abuse by the youth every year.
Hypothetically visualize Xi Jinping sitting through a speech of Trump where he would reiterate his tariffs policy on China and making a statement in Taiwan too and Jinping would sit through without being able to reply to his statement. Clearly Xi Jinping has no intention of attending the inauguration where he cannot have a say and sees China as the preeminent power as an alternative to the USA.
Trumps tariff policy is going to hurt both countries. China’s economy will dry up for lack of exports to its major trading partner and in the USA importers of Chinese goods or intermediaries for finished products would pass on the burden to the retailers who in turn would pass it on to the consumer.
Consequentially, the prices of goods would go up such as groceries and other goods where Chinese imports come into play, defeating the very purpose for which he was elected by the people who believed that he would bring prices down and make the kitchen table an easier proposition than the democrats’ regime under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who he defeated in the 2024 elections in a resounding manner.
Trump also has hawkish advisors on China. How will he get past them? Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Défense Secretary Pet Hegseth, both yet to be confirmed by the senate, are known for their tough stands on China.
Trump has a fetish for doing exactly the opposite of what his Washington politicians or bureaucrats tell him. In his first term he was told not to ally with Russia and that is exactly what he did, with his complex duplicitous policy on the erstwhile state of the Soviet Union. HIs approach on foreign policies is often contrarian. Slashing import duties on Chinese goods and then extending an invite to the Chinese president to come to the inauguration of his 2nd term presidency as entirely contrary in approach.
On January 20, President ‘trump will take oath at the same spot on capitol hill where his supporters rioted four years ago while he took the oath to preserve, protect and defend the constitution. And an extraordinary VIP guest looks on, overshadowing ex-presidents, military brass, and members of Congress.

Consequentially, the prices of goods would go up such as groceries and other goods where Chinese imports come into play, defeating the very purpose for which he was elected by the people who believed that he would bring prices down and make the kitchen table an easier proposition than the democrats’ regime under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who he defeated in the 2024 elections in a resounding manner. Trump also has hawkish advisors on China. How will he get past them? Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Défense Secretary Pet Hegseth, both yet to be confirmed by the senate, are known for their tough stands on China.
Trump has a fetish for doing exactly the opposite of what his Washington politicians or bureaucrats tell him. In his first term he was told not to ally with Russia and that is exactly what he did, with his complex duplicitous policy on the erstwhile state of the Soviet Union. HIs approach on foreign policies is often contrarian. Slashing import duties on Chinese goods and then extending an invite to the Chinese president to come to the inauguration of his 2nd term presidency as entirely contrary in approach.

On January 20, President ‘trump will take oath at the same spot on capitol hill where his supporters rioted four years ago while he took the oath to preserve, protect and defend the constitution. And an extraordinary VIP guest looks on, overshadowing ex-presidents, military brass, and members of Congress.
Bundled up to ward off the winter chill is Xi Jinping, the hardline leader of China — the country everyone on the inaugural platform sees as an existential threat to US superpower dominance as a 21st century cold war accelerates. Imagine.
A fantastic picture indeed, because even before sources confirmed Xi would not attend, it was obvious it could not happen, despite Trump’s stunning invitation to the leader of the Chinese Communist Party for a second inauguration he hopes to turn into a striking global statement.

Getting Xi to fly across the world would be an enormous coup for the president-elect — a fact that would make it politically unfeasible for the Chinese leader. Such a visit would put the Chinese president in the position of paying homage to Trump and American might — which would conflict with his vision for China’s assumption of a rightful role as a preeminent global power, CNN columnist Stephen Collision wrote in an analytical piece.
At the inaugural ceremony, Xi would be forced to sit and listen to Trump without having any control over what the new president might say while lacking a right of reply. Xi’s presence would also be seen as endorsing a democratic transfer of power — anathema for an autocrat in a one-party state obsessed with crushing individual expression., Stephen wrote.
Trump’s invitation to Xi can be considered significant as it demonstrates the incoming presidents’ confidence and ambition over the power he wields as the POTUS ahead of his 2nd term. Trump has been asking other world leaders if they want to come to the inauguration — in a break with convention.
Grant gesture marks Trumps foreign policy and his willingness to trample diplomatic codes with his unpredictable approach. The invite to Xi shows that Trump believes that the force of his personality alone can be a decisive factor in forging diplomatic breakthroughs. He is far from the only president to pursue this approach — which rarely works since hostile US adversaries make hardnosed choices on national interest rather than vibes, diplomatic observers said.
The president-elect’s invitation to Xi is all the more interesting because he’s spent the last few weeks shaping a foreign policy team that is deeply hawkish on China, including his pick for secretary of state,Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and for national security adviser, Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, who see China as a multi-front threat to the United States, economically, on the high seas and even in space, media reports said.
“This is a remarkably interesting move by Trump that fits very well with his practice of unpredictability. I do not think anyone expected this,” said Lily McElwee, deputy director and fellow in the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). McElwee said the invitation should be seen in the context of sticks and carrots that the president-elect is wielding as he gets ready to take over the world’s most critical diplomatic relationship. “This is a ridiculously cheap carrot. It is a symbolic carrot — it disrupts the tone of the relationship a little bit in a way that certainly does not undermine US interests.”
Trump’s outreach to Xi is timed when fears mount that tense US-China relations will get even worse in the coming administration with officials determined to build on an already tough line adopted by the Biden administration, which built on a stiffening of policy during the first Trump term.
US and China are embattled over Taiwan, an island democracy that China claims as part of its territory and that the United States might or might not defend if Xi orders an invasion. China is increasing its cooperation with other US foes in an informal anti-Western axis alongside Russia, North Korea and Iran thus launching a new cold war with the US and Europe, the AXIs powers being a motley bunch of dictatorships.
The defines forces of both US and China often come precipitously close to clashes in the South and East China seas. And lawmakers in both parties (Republican and Democrats) accuse China of stealing US economic and military secrets and of failing to live up to international law and trading rules.
Is the Trump hardline approach towards others nations true reflected in the approach by his hardline officials and policies or is it more accurately represented by the president-elect’s head-spinning moves, which reveal a zeal for making deals at the negotiating table with the world’s tough-guy leaders using tariffs as bargaining chip in talks?
Trump’s first major initiative on relations with China

Trump’s latest gambit might feel chaotic — but that does not mean it cannot work.
Trump’s China moves are most often confusing — since he seems to believe that Beijing’s trade policies are a direct threat to the US and that it has been ripping America off for decades. But he still wants to be friends with Xi. While on bis campaign trail in 2024, Trump repeatedly stressed that Xi was tough and smart and that they were friends — deluded in self-belief that their cordiality meant the Chinese leader held a similar opinion of him.
Trump expressed this contradiction within a single sentence in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC “We’ve been talking and discussing with President Xi, some things and others, other world leaders, and I think we’re going to do very well all around,” Trump said. But he added: “We have been abused as a country. We have been badly abused from an economic standpoint.”

Trump’s penchant for undermining his administration’s tough policy was quite evident in his first term, especially with strongmen like Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Sometimes he took positions simply because everyone was telling him not to. He just liked taking decisions in opposition to his advisors to assert himself as the boss.
One of Trump’s former national security advisers, H.R. McMaster, noted in his book “At War with Ourselves” that this was especially pronounced with Putin. “Like his predecessors George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Trump was overconfident in his ability to improve relations with the dictator in the Kremlin,” McMaster wrote.

“Trump, the self-described ‘expert dealmaker,’ believed he could build a personal rapport with Putin. Trump’s tendency to be reflexively contrarian only added to his determination. The fact that most foreign policy experts in Washington advocated for a tough approach to the Kremlin seemed only to drive the president to the opposite approach. “Diplomatic observers felt.
Such a contrary approach of Trump may be influencing him to hand over his early olive branch to Xi. And the president-elect may also foresee a new trade deal with Beijing even if a first-term bilateral pact was a bust. The Phase One trade deal he concluded in late 2019 and hailed as “historic” never came to fruition. While Trump turned sharply against Xi months later because of the Covid-19 pandemic that started in the Chinese city of Wuhan, it was never clear that Xi ever intended to fully implement what Trump claimed was large-scale economic structural change and massive purchases of US agricultural, energy and manufactured goods. There is no evidence Xi has changed his mind.
Trump’s tariff strategy also comes up for scrutiny. No one knows whether a president reluctant to hurt his base is ready to pay a political price that such an approach would result in. Despite his insistence that tariffs would end up costing Beijing billions, higher prices for imports would be passed by US retailers onto consumers — including voters who saw Trump as the best hope of easing soaring prices for groceries.

Another question: Does Trump see tariffs as a negotiating tactic or a genuine act of economic warfare? Many analysts think his threats against allies like Canada or the European Union are simply meant to improve his negotiating position. But such is the antipathy to China in Washington that trade wars with Beijing could be more enduring and an end in themselves.
“With China, we still have a question mark about whether tariff threats are aimed as negotiating leverage towards a deal, or they are aimed at some sort of unilateral decoupling of the US and Chinese economies?” McElwee said.
Beijing seems to be taking Trump seriously. The Chinese leaders have already prepped up their retaliatory tools against the Trumps trade policies. It announced an anti-trust investigation against US-based chip maker Nvidia. On another front of the tech war, China banned the export of several rare minerals to the United States. It pledged to increase the budget deficit, borrow more money, and loosen monetary policy to safeguard economic growth as a shield against new tensions with Trump.

In the ultimate analysis, a trade war could be disastrous for both China and America. While tariffs could send prices higher in the US, they could dry up profits and exacerbate some of China’s biggest economic vulnerabilities, including industrial overcapacity and low household demand.

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