Behind the ceremony

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Thursday the 14th of May. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. 

Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

First up on The World and Everything in It: The U.S.-China summit.

President Trump is in Beijing for a high-stakes summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He brought key Cabinet officials, defense and trade advisers, and a long list of CEOs. The stated agenda includes trade, investment, Iran, and other matters. 

But the deeper question is whether Trump arrives with leverage—or whether Xi sees an opening.

EICHER: Michael Sobolik is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. His specialty is U.S.-China relations and great-power competition. He's author of the book Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance.

Michael, thank you for making some time for us, I know it's a busy time for a China analyst! Good morning to you. 

SOBOLIK: Good morning, glad to be here. Thanks for having me on.

EICHER: Well, you said on one of these many recent podcasts you've been on that Xi Jinping in advance of the summit has a pretty extensive “Christmas wish list.” What is at the top?

SOBOLIK: Taiwan is at the very top, and honestly, Taiwan has been at the top of the Chinese Communist Party's wish list for decades now when it comes to the United States. 

When Richard Nixon went to China in 1972, the top of his list was getting America out of Vietnam quickly and safely. At the top of Mao Zedong's list—Mao, one of the famous butchers of the 20th century with the number of people he and the communist ideology killed inside of China—at the top of Mao's list was Taiwan. And it's been that way ever since.

The Chinese Communist Party views an independent Taiwan as an ideological challenge, as a civilizational affront to China, and maybe like a geopolitical embarrassment, because from their perspective it's a divided China that they need to reunite.

From many people in Taiwan's perspective—and I feel like I can say this with some confidence because I was in Taiwan within the past month for a week-long series of meetings on a delegation— the Taiwanese people quite like their freedom. They quite like their democracy. Generally speaking, they love the United States and they're very grateful for the military support that we afford them and for the diplomatic relationship (even though it's unofficial) the diplomatic relationship that we have had with Taiwan for decades now.

So Xi Jinping is going to be looking to create daylight between the United States and Taiwan. And it's something that President Trump knows is coming, and he's going to need to be able to handle that situation well when Xi Jinping brings it up.

BROWN: A piece you wrote for your think tank argues President Trump’s best leverage is human rights—especially political prisoners such as Jimmy Lai and Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri. You say those cases hit Beijing’s deepest vulnerability: fear of its own people.

Do you think it’s likely President Trump will raise human rights, even if he does it privately?

SOBOLIK: This I think is going to be the most important question, Myrna. And yes, I do think he's going to raise it and I hope he does even more than that. I hope he leans in and really puts some political heft and capital behind this ask. 

Right now with the summit, you basically have a tale of two lists. The list that's gotten a lot of attention is the list of CEOs that are going to China with President Trump. My fear is that the president is going to walk into a trap, because it seems like he's going to try to do what a lot of his predecessors have tried to do, which is crack open the China market so U.S. businesses can get a fair shake and can compete fairly inside of China.

On paper, that's great. In reality, the Chinese Communist Party has never really been that interested in treating American companies fairly. They're interested in acquiring intellectual property by hook or by crook, which they have done. And usually they will use that to prop up Chinese competitors that have historically run some American businesses off of the playing field completely. 

So there's a second list that I think is going to be a lot more, not just morally important for the president to raise, but I think could actually have more geopolitical benefit for the president to raise, and that's the list of political prisoners that he has mentioned. And for these political prisoners, you mentioned a couple of them here, Myrna, you mentioned Jimmy Lai, you also mentioned Pastor Ezra Jin. 

President Trump is committed to raising both of these cases. This is where the CCP is the weakest. They're terrified of their own people and that's why they censor them and that's why they imprison them.

This is the intersection of the right thing to do and the strategic thing to do, which in foreign policy, you usually don't get those things overlapping, but in this situation, you do. And let's face it, any promises that Xi makes for market access, he's probably gonna break in a few years. But if we can get these prisoners home, that would actually be a material gain.

EICHER: So President Trump arrives with the Iran war still very much unresolved. Talks are stalled, Iran’s blockade pressure continues, U.S.-Israeli objectives still out of reach. You made the point in The Free Press, Michael, that asking China for help on Iran could repeat a mistake former President Biden made before Russia invaded Ukraine—and Beijing ended up helping Moscow and not Washington.

Now, President Trump may want or need President Xi’s help with pressuring Iran. But surely he doesn’t want to come off looking like Joe Biden. 

Is the lesson there not even to try, or is there a better way to try to leverage China against Iran?

SOBOLIK: The best thing we can do with China is instead of asking them for help, to hold them accountable where they're breaking our sanctions, where they're making the problem worse. We should expect China to stop sending weapon components to Iran, and they've continued to do this. 

A number of weeks ago, President Trump said publicly that any nation sending Iran weapons would be hit immediately with a 50 % tariff. Not that long after, there was a weapons shipment from China where there were some drone components and some weapons precursors that were intercepted. Nothing happened. There were no tariffs employed. There were no sanctions levied, at least as far as I can tell. 

What the United States has been doing, and this is good as far as it goes, they've been sanctioning individual companies doing bad things. That's fine, but listen, China's really good at evading sanctions. 

What we really need to be doing is changing the cost calculus to make the pain of supporting Iran greater than the benefit of supporting Iran for China. Part of that, I think, needs to be following through on some threats that the administration has made toward Chinese banks that are allowing and facilitating financial transactions for Iranian entities. 

If President Trump expects Xi Jinping to help him, I think he's in for a rude awakening, because Xi Jinping is not our friend. But having that clarity of no matter what promises or assurances Xi makes, they're probably gonna be broken, you need to go in there willing to change that cost benefit calculation for China.

BROWN: Michael Sobolik is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. We will be watching.

Michael, thank you.

SOBOLIK: Thank you so much.

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