Trump and Xi are the odd power couple

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are working on their relationship.

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping participate in a welcoming ceremony at the Great Hall of the People yesterday. Picture: AP

Is Donald Trump’s flight to Beijing this week set to be his “Nixon ­moment”, where he achieves a staggering breakthrough against all expectation in an apparently alien environment?

No.

Sometimes, in politics and diplomacy, unlikely people hit it off: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; Bob Hawke and John Howard; Barack Obama and Angela Merkel; Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai.

Odd couples in the past have combined to make one plus one mean more than two.

Obama, hoping to create some chemistry with then new Chinese leader Xi Jinping, invited him to Sunnylands Ranch in California in 2013. But the relationship did not quite jell.

In April this year it was Trump’s turn, hosting Xi at his own Mar-a-Lago resort at Florida’s Palm Beach. But while Trump — then as again this week — excitedly toasted Xi as “great”, the Chinese leader largely gazed back with a ­bemused, almost Buddhist-like composure.

Trump said after that first encounter: “I really liked him a lot. I think he liked me. We have a great chemistry together.”

Then shortly before their second meeting during the G20 summit in Hamburg in July, by which time Xi had failed to bring North Korean “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-un to his knees, as Trump had hoped, the US President tweeted: “So much for China working with us — but we had to give it a try!”

After that German meeting, and in the immediate wake of the death of leading Chinese philosopher Liu Xiaobo in detention, Trump was back on track with praise for Xi: “He’s a friend of mine. I have great respect for him … a great leader … a very talented man. I think he’s a very good man.

“President Xi is a terrific guy. I like being with him a lot, and he’s a very special person.”

This message was resumed in Japan at the start of this week: “I like him a lot. I consider him a friend. With that being said, he represents China; I represent the United States.”

Xi has never reciprocated publicly or, one suspects, even privately. It is hard to imagine the all-powerful Chinese leader acknow­ledging anyone else’s “greatness”, except perhaps his only peer, now, in the Communist Party’s pantheon as enshrined in its constitution — Mao Zedong.

En route to China, Trump tweeted from Seoul: “I very much look forward to meeting with President Xi, who is just off his great political victory.”

This was not, however, a victory won in or by any political game that might be familiar to ­Trump, however his opponents may characterise his winning the Republican Party nomination or the election campaign against Hillary Clinton.

The Chinese President’s victory was won by a singular combination: birthright (Xi often talks of his “red genes” as a form of legitimacy); brute force, purging his opponents through the vast anti-corruption campaign that at some stage often involves torture of those accused; and rare cleverness as a party operator, sidelining the factions and the leading families.

This path to Xi’s “political victory” and the nature of the power that he possesses are strikingly different from Trump’s.

Xi’s power emanates from a Leninist political party that has retained sole control of the world’s most populous country for 68 years.

In recent times the party has wrapped around itself all of China’s history and culture and emblems. Its leader personifies the party and thus — in its own perception — everything “China”. Xi is himself utterly sincere in this role. He is no Machiavelli, adopting convenient poses or contriving opportunistic alliances. He believes China is the best of humanity, that the party is the best of China, and that he has been destined to lead it for the foreseeable future, probably for a further 10 years and maybe more.

He does not cut deals. Others can approach to offer their ser­vices, or their corporations or institutions such as universities, at his disposal. He will consider receiving them, for China’s sake.

He does not deliver especially original, amusing or even interesting speeches. That would mark him out as needy, or ingratiating. He delivered his 3½-hour speech that opened the recent five-yearly party congress in the Great Hall of the People with barely an inflection even to elicit applause to give himself a much-needed break so he could sip some water.

That and his shorter closing address were pitched in an almost dismissive tone. He was laying it down, and it was up to that audience, in particular, to pick it up and obey.

In preparation for the congress, the 89 million members of the party were required to read Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, a compilation of 79 of his speeches spilling across 516 pages in the ­English edition.

It has been translated by the Chinese authorities into 22 languages and 6.4 million copies have been distributed around the world. Copies in a further 13 languages are being prepared for release by the end of next year.

The party’s flagship publication, People’s Daily,describes it as “the most influential book written by a Chinese leader” in the past 40 years — in effect, since Mao’s death.

The massive hi-tech exhibition of party achievements to coincide with the congress was suffused with images of Xi. It displayed 16 books of similar compilations of his thoughts, as well as iconic memorabilia such as the binoculars he once used to view a People’s Liberation Army exercise.

Xi does not tweet. He has banned Twitter, as well as Google, Facebook, YouTube and many other sources of information and entertainment that the party does not control. He is turning China’s internet into an intranet.

Last year, during a visit to China’s three leading state media organisations during which he said journalists should all have the surname “Party”, Xi sat uncomfortably in front of a computer — the only evidence that he has ever used one.

Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon in 1972.

Does Xi have friends? The system of which he is at the apex does not make it easy. Politburo members must gain explicit approval before meeting their peers, even informally for tea, lest they appear to be plotting.

His closest political ally — whom he has known since they befriended each other as young men “sent down to the countryside” during the Cultural Revolution — has been Wang Qishan, who set up and pursued the anti-corruption campaign with considerable ­effici­ency. But at the recent congress, Xi did not seek to bend on behalf of 69-year-old Wang the party’s convention that people retire at 68, even though he possessed ample political capital to have done so.

The only other international leader with whom Xi appears to have developed any particular rapport is Russian President Vladimir Putin. They have things in common, including running authoritarian regimes with scant interest in obliging Western liberal concerns.

Putin was a KGB agent who retains a certain attachment to the old Soviet system, which Xi believes need never have been lost if party verities had been maintained and its past leaders, such as Joseph Stalin, venerated.

During the past day, Xi and Trump have spent a lot of face-time together. That suits both.

But Trump has needed to extract some “deliverables”, especially on North Korea — whereas from Xi’s perspective, the imagery looks great to his domestic audience of merely hosting, and apparently aweing, a US President around one monumental, historic Chinese structure after another.

James Mann, the author of three books on US-China relations including the devastating The China Fantasy, says: “Trump has a huge ego. The Chinese love big egos. Flattery is a skill Chinese officials have perfected over the millennia,” including with Kissinger, who as national security adviser masterminded Nixon’s surprise visit to Beijing in 1972 that established relations with the ­People’s Republic of China.

Kissinger himself confessed: “After a dinner of maotai (a Chinese liquor) and Peking duck, I’ll sign anything.”

Xi can afford to be especially ­relaxed around Trump since their ambitions don’t even collide heavily. Mann says: “For the first time since the Nixon opening, China openly views itself as the emerging superpower on the order of the US. For the first time, America has a president who sees himself not as the leader of the West or the free world but merely of the US, of America first.”

Trump appears to lack interest in history, whereas Xi constantly enlists the party’s version of history to vindicate its supremacy, and that of China.

However, Trump has his fans in China, where he is known as Chuanpu — especially among those who, rather bravely, like that he is a political outsider who broke in, that he speaks his mind defying the protocols, that he was a successful private businessman, that he does not set great store by ­respect or conventions.

For now the tide of the times is rising on Xi’s side.

But Trump remains indefatigably determined to wrest one big favour from him, on North Korea or on trade and investment, if not on this trip then at the next encounter.

In the meantime, they may be mostly talking right past each other rather than making magic together — but they’re not arguing or pulling their countries apart.

Like any couple who know they need to make the best of things as they are, they are working on the relationship.