Analysis | Ahead of Xi-Trump summit, what China should do to get ties with the US on an even keel
Access to Chinese markets and policies on North Korea and the South China Sea are among the issues Beijing needs to address, writes Francesco Sisci
After a lot rhetorical sparring and the puzzling visit to Beijing by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are due to meet in Florida early next month.
Nobody knows if it will be the scene of a grand bargain between the US and China or will merely open the stage to a period of enhanced confrontation between the two countries.
Trump has made a virtue of being unpredictable and Xi has a history of keeping his cards close to his chest. To underscore the uncertainties ahead of the meeting, just hours before his arrival in China, Tillerson said military action against North Korea was an option (something bound to irritate Xi) and yet at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing he cordially brushed aside such hard talk and called for cooler heads on the issue of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme.
So far we don’t even know what the two presidents will talk about in the US, but it is not just their two nations’ ties at stake. The international situation in which both have stakes is highly complex. The old World Trade Organisation order, set up just after the end of the cold war, is falling apart and is perhaps being replaced by a cobweb of bilateral commercial treaties centred on the United States.
The IMF and the World Bank, the backbones of global finance since the second world war, have also been wobbling for years, but nobody shows any real interest in fixing them. In the meantime, the US dollar has regained traction, despite the fact that its exchange rate has not surged against major currencies, thus helping American exports and stemming its imports.