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EXCERPT:
On May 13, 2026, Air Force One landed in Beijing for President Donald Trump’s first state visit to China in nearly a decade. That same morning, the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations published a report titled The Evolving World and the Right Way to China-US Coexistence. The summit dominated global media coverage for two days. The report received almost none.
The Beijing summit produced familiar imagery: honor guards, a state banquet in the Great Hall of the People, and carefully choreographed warmth. Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced that both sides had agreed to “strategic stability” as a framework for the next three years, and both leaders praised the collegial atmosphere.
Beneath the pageantry, China’s premier foreign policy think tank had published its own assessment of the state of bilateral relations. Read against Mao Zedong’s original theory of protracted struggle, its report describes the current moment not as a step toward partnership but as the product of a strategy in which struggle precedes and produces cooperation on terms favorable to Beijing. Treating that stabilization as evidence of strategic convergence, rather than as a single stage within a longer competition, would be a misreading worth correcting.
