The New Yorker's Evan Osnos shares his thoughts on the Trump-Xi summit

NPR's Steve Inskeep talks with the New Yorker's Evan Osnos about his impressions of the Trump-Xi summit.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Evan Osnos has been listening with us. He spent years as the New Yorker's Beijing correspondent and is with us here in the capital. Evan, welcome.

EVAN OSNOS: Thanks, Steve.

INSKEEP: Thanks for coming by. OK. So the two sides put out these diverging accounts of what the presidents talked about. Do you feel you understand what was going on in that room?

OSNOS: I think it'll take a few more days. We'll start to - things will dribble out. One thing did catch my attention, though. When the Chinese side said that the most important issue from their perspective was Taiwan, that's being pretty blunt. That tells you that they believe this is something that they want to draw attention to, and we'll have to find out later. We may not know immediately what it is that the American side committed to.

INSKEEP: So even though the Chinese statement repeated a lot of words and phrases that they've said many, many, many times about Taiwan, it struck you as significant. It is news that they brought up Taiwan in this way.

OSNOS: It's news in the sense that I think if you ask most Americans, they don't think about Taiwan every day, but in China and in Beijing, this is issue No. 1. So it's not something that's going to go away on its own.

INSKEEP: Now, let me ask you about conversations in other rooms, if I can. You know China really well. You were mentioning just a moment ago you've been coming here for 30 years.

OSNOS: Yeah. That's right.

INSKEEP: Which is amazing, and done a lot of reporting that a lot of people have paid attention to. You know a lot of people here and here you are back again. What strikes you about the conversations you've been having?

OSNOS: You know, one phrase keeps coming up when you talk to Chinese folks who pay a lot of attention to this relationship. They say the U.S.-China relationship is like a big building on a very wobbly foundation. That's the formulation. And what they're getting at is that they think that the United States is - and they're not wrong about this - very divided internally, and they see that reflected in how it deals with China. Some of them go so far as to say they think the United States is in a kind of terminal decline. Xi Jinping has talked about the East is rising, the West is declining. It's a very controversial idea. You know, there's a lot of people on both sides who say, actually, that may not be the case, but it does shape how the Chinese government deals with the United States.

INSKEEP: How different is that Chinese perspective than it would have been 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 25, 30 years ago?

OSNOS: It's a big difference. You know, when I first started coming here, Steve, the Chinese economy was the same size as Italy's economy. I mean, here we are talking in this big kind of cluster of high rises. Back then, Beijing was a really low-slung city. And over the years, as it has advanced, the United States in that same generation has gone through a lot of hard times, and we've become, obviously, in ways we all know, much more polarized, and our own economic relationship with China has become a political issue at home. The Chinese are very aware of that. They always tend to know the pressures on an American president when they arrive and they know the - call it the decision space that person has and what they can and can't do.

INSKEEP: The United States has begun talking about China as a peer competitor. The president of the United States has talked about a G2 of two countries ruling the world, more or less. The Chinese, over the years, have demanded to be treated on terms of equality. Do you get a sense, watching this summit, that they feel like they actually are an equal and a peer competitor of the United States?

OSNOS: I think they do. In fact, I think on some issues, they feel that they may have the upper hand. They have leverage, for instance, when it comes to issues around whether the United States can get access to really essential rare earth elements that we need for our technology. So, for the first time in this very long relationship, more than 50 years after Richard Nixon first came to Beijing, you now get the sense that these are two powers that the Chinese believe are on an equal footing. Now that can also blow back. You know, we've seen patterns over the history when China has said, OK, we have the upper hand, and they may overreach and then it produces an American reaction. So that cycle is what they're trying to avoid now. And what both of these presidents today were trying to indicate was, let's see if we can get back to business, perhaps, back to more cultural exchange, get more students going back and forth.

INSKEEP: You told me here how the Chinese perspective has changed over time. Of course, now you live in the United States. You talk with a lot of American officials. How has the American conversation about China changed in the last few years?

OSNOS: Well, it's no longer one in which the United States is deciding how much attention it wants to apply to China. China sort of seizes that attention, and there's a lot of wariness in Washington. You know, how much access do they want Chinese technology companies to have in the United States?

INSKEEP: Yeah.

OSNOS: Do they want to have, you know, Chinese technology companies opening factories, sharing technology?

INSKEEP: President Trump wants investment from China in the United States, but Americans also wonder, do we want that Chinese access to the United States?

OSNOS: That's a real debate to be had in Washington. So, you know, what we saw on the surface today was an effort to try to bring these two together,` and that's meaningful. Pageantry is substance in diplomacy, but beneath it, there are big structural questions that remain unsolved.

INSKEEP: Evan Osnos, it's a pleasure to see you. Thanks for coming by.

OSNOS: My pleasure. Thanks, Steve.

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