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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Guardian.
Chapter 2: What does China want from Trump during his visit?
Today, what does China want from Trump? Let's travel back in time to what feels like a lifetime ago, 2017. A freshly inaugurated Donald Trump arrives in Beijing and steps out of a stretch limit. A military band starts up. Happy children wave American flags. And throughout his trip, China pulls out all the stops to give Trump the kind of treatment he drools over.
No expenses spared to show him a good time and give him the kind of pageantry which we all now know that he really enjoys. Every effort is made to make him feel special. They gave him a private tour of the Forbidden City, which is quite rare. They took him into rooms... in this ancient imperial palace that US presidents have not stepped into before. The carpet under his feet is almost always red.
Back then, China really wanted to impress Trump.
Chapter 3: How did Trump's 2017 visit to Beijing differ from 2026?
Trump was this kind of unknown quantity who China was keen to build a good relationship with.
Fast forward to 2026 and Trump is back in China. Same city, same leaders, same carpet. Very different world. In the nine years since his last visit, we've had a U.S.-China trade war.
It's going to make us a much stronger, much richer nation.
COVID-19.
That name gets further and further away from China as opposed to calling it the Chinese virus.
Trump losing power, then getting it back again. A lot of conflict. Another U.S.-China trade war. On Wednesday evening Beijing time, Trump stepped off Air Force One, Elon Musk in his entourage, to start a visit that is expected to be all business.
We're in a very turbulent geopolitical moment and so it's coming at a very delicate moment.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the US-China trade war on this meeting?
Kind of China is going into this meeting with a slightly stronger posture and there's kind of less of a sense that Trump can be wooed and more of a sense of this is a businessman who we need to do a deal with.
From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today on Focus, Trump's back in Beijing. Amy Hawkins, you're The Guardian's Sina China correspondent, and you will be reporting on Trump's visit for us from Beijing. And it's been nine years, nearly a decade, since Trump travelled to China. This time around, it's a lightning visit, not much sightseeing going on.
So can you tell me, what is this meeting even about?
It's a good question. I think if you'd asked me this question about a month ago when the visit was first planned for, I would say this meeting is about the trade war. So last year, Trump launched an aggressive global trade war, but one that was especially targeted at China.
China, 67%. So we're going to be charging a discounted reciprocal tariff of 34%. I think, in other words, they charge us, we charge them, we charge them less. So how can anybody be upset? They will be because we never charge anybody anything.
which risked bringing US-China trade basically to a halt. That trade war kind of reached a stalemate or a truce or whatever you want to call it in October last year when Trump and Xi met in South Korea.
Mr. President, Wall Street analysts have coined a new term called the taco trade. They're saying Trump always chickens out on new tariff threats and that's why markets are higher this week. What's your response to that?
I kick out. Oh, and then I chicken out. I've never heard that. You mean because I reduced China from 145 percent that I set down to 100 and then down to another number? Six months ago, this country was stone-cold dead. We had a dead country. We had a country people didn't think it was going to survive, and you ask a nasty question like that. It's called negotiation.
Obviously, in recent weeks, Trump has launched strikes on Iran, which has completely kind of upended the global economy, has launched a new war in the Middle East. There has been specific and explicit pressure on China to try and push Iran towards some kind of ceasefire with the US. And now, as much as China would rather that wasn't the case, I think Iran is going to dominate the meeting.
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Chapter 5: How does the geopolitical landscape affect Trump's negotiations with China?
Whatever the chaos has been unleashed by it, he nonetheless did, you know, kidnap the president of Venezuela. He assassinated the leader of Iran. And he's kind of willing to deal with these chaotic and destructive consequences, which presumably many other US presidents wouldn't have been able to. And it kind of... shows that what Trump wants, Trump does.
And I think that has injected a dose of slight caution into the way that the Chinese government is approaching these talks, while at the same time, probably feeling quite comforted by the fact that they're seen as the more stable, reliable global power at the moment.
And what about people, you know, normal people in China? Have we got any sense of how they feel about Trump or about this visit?
It's hard to kind of sum up what the average person's opinion is about Trump. But, you know, whereas before he was definitely seen as kind of an entertainer, a buffoon, definitely people take him a lot more seriously now. And, you know, people see the US as being the source of global disorder. US is described as a troublemaker. The world problems are created by the US.
I think now the average person in China sees Trump more as a kind of a foe who needs to be dealt with rather than a kind of friendly buffoon.
And we know that Trump, you know, says he likes Xi.
It's a great honor to be with a friend of mine, really for a long time now, if you think about it. But President Xi is a great leader of a great country. And I think we're going to have a fantastic relationship for a long period of time.
I think he's got a photo of them both together in his office, in the Oval Office. So is the same replicated in China?
Yeah, I mean, they haven't been in person that many times before. But you saw in South Korea last year that she seemed to laugh at a joke that Trump made. But no one knows what that joke was.
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Chapter 6: What role does Iran play in the US-China discussions?
I find him to be a tremendous guy. But I'll be talking about, that'll be one subject. But he's been very nice about this. In all fairness, he gets his oil from hormones. He's been I think he's been very respectful. We haven't been challenged by China. They don't challenge us. And he wouldn't do that. I don't think he'd do that because of me.
And it does put the U.S. in a slightly odd position of they're basically asking for China's help for a war that Trump started and has nothing to do with China. And, you know, definitely isn't going to send in military support to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz or anything like that.
But for the most part, I think China wants Iran to agree to a ceasefire, sure, and does have some leverage over Iran, given that it buys 80% or more of Iran's oil. But it's not looking to kind of destabilize its own delicate relationship with the Middle East, with Gulf countries, with Iran, for the sake of giving Trump a political win.
And so when it comes to these talks, what kind of leverage does China have in these negotiations with the U.S.
?
The big leverage that China has at the moment is rare earths. So in the trade war last year, China banned the export of rare earths, which are these kind of critical minerals, which are actually found kind of all over the world. But China dominates about 90% of the supply chain of the mining and processing of these elements.
And they are absolutely vital to everything from your smartphone to your car, but also to US military equipment. And China, when it kind of pulled that lever of banning the export of rare earths, America really felt the pain. I mean, car factories in America were forced to close.
The US military suddenly realized that it couldn't produce the technology it needed for certain radars and certain advanced military equipment.
The reality is they just want to exert economic control on the world. They started in April with the rare earth magnets. They're using anything else that has happened as a pretext. The reality is we made a promise in May to keep our reciprocal tariff on them at 10%. We kept that promise and they have not kept theirs.
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