The crowd in the formal dining room atop the State Department was exuberant: China’s incoming president, Xi Jinping, the guest of honor, stood on the podium, champagne glass in hand. The businessmen, diplomats, and China handlers mingled, wreathed in smiles. Not because it was Valentine’s Day. The Americans saw the son of a reformist Chinese leader, a cautious, pragmatic, technocrat who had built his career in coastal provinces that embraced markets and global trade. They believed he would be friendly to the United States, even compliant, just like his most recent predecessors.
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How wrong they were. Xi has turned out to be the toughest, most irreconcilable Chinese leader the U.S. has faced since the opening of formal relations between the two countries in 1979. He wants China to surpass the U.S. as the world’s leading power, and has made little secret of his determination to win. When President Joe Biden had his final meeting with Xi in November 2024 in Peru, the Chinese leader warned Biden to his face that if the U.S. threw a punch, China would counter-punch.
As Xi strives toward his goal of global dominance, he finds himself in a head spinning relationship with the mercurial President Donald Trump. Some refer to the relationship between Xi and Trump as capo vs. capo, others invoke the image of Big Men striving to rule the world as traditional diplomacy and alliances fade. A weakened Europe, a frazzled Indo-Pacific, an irrelevant United Nations are giving way to two leaders with outsized egos, large quotients of vanity, and a shared vision of autocratic rule.
But the most striking thing about Xi and Trump are their completely different personal histories and biographies. It’s hard to imagine two men of similar age facing each other with such contrasting formative experiences. Xi is 72; Trump is 79.
Xi is the son of Xi Zhongxun, a privileged senior Communist party official who was sent to prison for 14, badly beaten in jail and persecuted by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution. Xi suffered humiliation at a young age. He was bullied at school—so much that he found it a relief when he was sent to the countryside to work with peasants. His father’s sullied reputation haunted him. Xi had to apply eight times to join the Communist Youth League. No surprise that one of his favorite books is a Russian novel, “What is to Be Done,” whose main character slept on a bed of nails to forge his will.
Around the time Xi was extricating himself from purgatory and returning to Beijing, Trump was rapidly ascending in New York. The son of a real estate magnate and a graduate of Wharton School of Finance, he swanned around Manhattan in a chauffeured, silver Cadillac planning real estate deals and dating slinky models. He lived in a penthouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the New York Times gushed in an adulatory profile that his looks were “ever so much like Robert Redford.” His father was remote, but encouraging.
By the mid-1970s, Xi had decided that the way to get ahead was to be loyal to the Communist Party, to be “redder than red” as the U.S. Embassy in Beijing put it in a cable to Washington. Family life was not easy: his sister committed suicide, his mother was remote. He went to university: his degree appears to have been in applied Marxism, and not in engineering as is often advertised.
Xi planned his rise carefully. In 1979, he joined the People’s Liberation Army as an officer in and served as an aide to the Secretary General of the Central Military Council. He was regularly seen wearing his military uniform. In 1982, Xi moved on to serve in a provincial leadership role in Hebei province, followed it up with leadership positions in bigger provinces, and ascended through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party.
Yet Trump and Xi share striking similarities in approach. As China’s military acquires more weapons and wealth, and appears stronger than ever, Xi is disrupting it. He has removed more top commanders, apparently on the grounds of corruption, than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. Trump is shaking up the Pentagon, encouraging his Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to fire generals seen to be close to previous administrations.
To the world, Xi projects a China that is organized, hurtling toward technological success, a big shiny bauble. He is aligning China with the Global South, and making inroads in the Indo-Pacific. He is causing strife among America’s allies in Europe. But at home, his domestic economy is in trouble. The younger ranks of Gen Z are disillusioned, worried that they won’t be able to enjoy the lifestyles of their parents. So far, Xi has ignored these signs of unhappiness in a volatile constituency.
Xi is the master of a repressive regime led by a Communist Party with an estimated 100 million members. He has worked assiduously to win complete domination of the party, knocking aside even retired elderly leaders, aided by surveillance mechanisms that his predecessors lacked. Xi’s control appears to have few barriers. Trump is relentless about exercising power, too, but he has to deal with a democratic system. Now he is venturing into lame duck territory, and the economy is hurting him in the opinion polls.
How do the two leaders treat each other? In public, it looks like faux chumminess. At their October meeting in South Korea, their first in five years, they agreed to a tenuous truce: Xi stepped back from his threat to ban rare earth mineral exports that are vital to the American economy; Trump retreated from imposing 145 % tariffs on Chinese goods. When Trump spoke hard into Xi’s ear at the start of the meeting; Xi, who does not understand much English, wore a faint smile. Afterwards, Trump insisted that “with 10 being the best, I would say the meeting was a 12.”
Many hurdles exist as the two capos map their next moves. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser in the Biden Administration noted in “Face-Off: The U.S. vs China,” a podcast I host that the United States and China are not going anywhere. They will remain the two most powerful nations and need to figure out how to exist in a super-charged environment.
The biggest test is coming up. Trump says he is going to meet Xi in Beijing in April. As his host, Xi is likely to treat him to an even grander version of the lavish tour of the Chinese capital he laid on for Trump during his first term. This time, the future of Taiwan, the island democracy that China claims as its own, is sure to be on the agenda.
Taiwan was not discussed in South Korea, apparently put aside by the Chinese until Beijing where it will be easier for Xi to be tougher. Trump has wobbled on the obligations of the U.S. to defend Taiwan, portraying the island as an unimportant speck off the coast of China. Xi will be pressing Trump hard to relent on Taiwan, and there are some bets he could win.