Deterring an attack on the island has been a bedrock American policy for 75 years. Xi Jinping sees a chance to change that.
Lingling Wei and Alex Leary
The Australian
For five decades, US presidents have stuck to a choreographed set of norms around Taiwan, the most dangerous flashpoint in US-China relations. Xi Jinping is betting President Trump is ready to tear up the American playbook.
Beijing got an inkling that Trump thought more transactionally about Taiwan than his predecessors in 2017, during his first state visit to China. According to former US officials, Trump offered to help the Chinese leader negotiate the status of Taiwan with its president at the time, Tsai Ing-wen.
“I know her, you know,” Trump told Xi, according to the officials. “I can help with this woman.”
The Chinese were shocked. It was such a baffling overture that Xi suspected it was an impulsive gesture, said people close to Beijing’s decision-making. In the lead-up to that first meeting, the then-new President Trump had broken norms in the opposite direction, taking a congratulatory call from Tsai and questioning US policy acknowledging the Chinese claim that Taiwan is part of China.
Beijing chose to ignore Trump’s offer, which hasn’t previously been disclosed, and retreated into the safety of traditional diplomatic scripts around the democratically run island that Beijing views as a breakaway province.
The issue promises to come up again in the two leaders’ next face-to-face summit. Trump is expected to press for increased Chinese purchases of American soybeans, oil, gas and Boeing planes, alongside eased export controls on rare-earth minerals. Xi, meanwhile, hopes to lay the groundwork to realign US policy on Taiwan, the people close to Beijing’s decision-making said.
Xi sees Trump as unwilling to come to Taiwan’s defence, the people said — especially if America’s involvement in the Middle East, which has led the US to redirect major military assets away from Asia, continues to distract Washington. The meeting itself had been scheduled for April 1, but was pushed back to May 14-15 after Trump requested a delay because of the war in Iran.
Xi is working under the assumption that, while Washington still supports Taiwan, Trump’s attitude toward the island is so uncertain that he has an opening. Trump has accused Taiwan of stealing America’s chip industry and last year hit the island with high tariffs before reducing them – moves that panicked Taiwanese officials.
“China is now more prepared and curious about how to utilise Trump to gain advantages regarding Taiwan,” said Kurt Campbell, former deputy secretary of state under President Joe Biden and now chairman of the Asia Group, a Washington consulting firm.
A senior administration official said Trump will likely try to find a “middle point” to accommodate Xi on Taiwan at the summit – a move that many analysts warn would be seen as a victory for Beijing.
Victory can ride on a few key words in official policy language. Xi is expected to test whether he can persuade Trump to “oppose” Taiwanese independence, versus the Biden administration’s policy that Washington “does not support” independence, according to the people close to Beijing. Xi will also likely seek to replace the longstanding US position of supporting a “peaceful resolution” of the Taiwan issue with the Beijing-preferred term “peaceful reunification.” Xi has tried this before.
During his 2023 summit at a secluded estate outside San Francisco with Biden, Xi called on the US to “support China’s peaceful reunification,” according to Beijing’s account of the exchange. The Biden team didn’t oblige.
US President Donald Trump will visit China to meet President Xi Jinping in a two-day trip on May 14 and 15. The meeting was originally set for this month in Beijing but was postponed due to the ongoing conflict between the US and Iran. A reciprocal visit by Xi to Washington is planned later in the year.
To Beijing, even a modest rhetorical concession from Trump would be a landmark psychological win – potentially turning the tide inside Taiwan toward the idea that some form of reunification is inevitable. Xi isn’t interested in having Trump personally broker any negotiations over the island’s future, the people close to Beijing said.
While Trump’s first term turned to open confrontation with China, his interest in re-engaging with Beijing reflects a recognition that the hostility has become too costly for American businesses and that critical US interests – from managing China’s chokehold on rare-earth minerals to stanching the flow of fentanyl – require a transactional dialogue.
At the same time, Xi believes he has cracked the code on managing Trump after Beijing neutralised Washington’s tariff assault last year with its own retaliatory measures.
In a sign Trump wants smooth relations with Xi, the White House paused a $US13bn ($18.7bn) arms sale package to Taiwan to avoid disrupting the coming summit, the senior administration official said. The decision came after Xi told the president in a February 4 call that the US must handle such arms sales with caution. The senior administration official said Trump is still weighing the sale’s final timing.
The tables turn
The situation today is an abrupt reversal for Xi from late 2016. The Chinese leader then was worried that the newly elected Trump might discard the bedrock of US-China diplomatic ties: the “One China” policy that acknowledges – without endorsing – Beijing’s position that there is only one Chinese government and that Taiwan is part of China.
Trump’s unpredictability unnerved the Chinese. He startled Beijing by taking Tsai’s congratulatory call on his election, making him the first US president-elect to speak directly to a Taiwanese leader since 1979, when Washington severed formal diplomatic ties with the island. Trump openly questioned why the US was bound by the ambiguous One China policy, but later backtracked.
The inconsistencies reflected Trump’s early scepticism of Taiwan’s strategic value, former US officials said, even if Beijing interpreted it as a worrying sign.
Today, it is Taipei, not Beijing, that stands to lose if Trump places the island on the negotiating table.
In February 2025, the State Department briefly removed a sentence from its online fact sheet that stated the US “does not support Taiwan independence.” Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs initially welcomed the update as “positive and friendly.”
To many in the government, the removal of the old restrictive wording felt like a rare moment where the US ceased to act as a police officer keeping Taiwan’s sovereignty in check.
However, some Taiwanese analysts cautioned that the change appeared to trade a predictable policy for a new era of strategic uncertainty. Without that line, they argued, the US had effectively abandoned its role as the guarantor of a status quo in which Taiwan never declares independence and Beijing never forcibly takes the island.
The change, those analysts said, would leave Taiwan to face Beijing’s escalating pressure without a clear American red line to point to. The State Department later took down the fact sheet, further obscuring the US’s official position. A State Department spokesperson said all bilateral relations fact sheets were archived and removed because most hadn’t been updated in more than two years, leaving them potentially outdated or inaccurate.
During early rounds of trade negotiations last year after the US imposed steep new tariffs, Xi’s economic tsar, Vice Premier He Lifeng, sought to bring the Taiwan issue into broader economic discussions, said people briefed on the matter. But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent – who has been leading the high-level talks with Beijing for the US – refused to engage, the people said, maintaining that Taiwan wasn’t part of the trade remit.
A formal rhetorical shift took place in the administration’s National Security Strategy issued in December.
Defence Minister Richard Marles explains China’s absence from the Exercise Kakadu Fleet Review. “The fleet review today reflects the participants of Exercise Kakadu,” Mr Marles said. “They were not invited to that exercise.”
In the hyperspecific “verb politics” of the Taiwan Strait, the document contained a subtle but debated change: While the US has traditionally “opposed” any unilateral change to the status quo, the new strategy stated only that it “does not support” such changes.
The strategy also dropped the decades-old requirement that the status quo must not be changed “by either side” – a phrase that historically cautioned both Beijing against an invasion and Taipei against a declaration of independence.
These concerns were compounded when the 2026 National Defence Strategy notably omitted Taiwan by name.
People close to the administration said the new security strategy is more explicit about defending Taiwan along with other Pacific islands stretching from Japan to the Philippines that serve as a critical barrier to Chinese maritime expansion. The defence strategy, they added, is technical rather than political, and public versions are often shorter for sensitivity and shouldn’t be seen as a policy shift.
Some officials argue that what really matters is real-world deterrence. Even if Trump agrees to Xi’s expected request for linguistic compromises during their coming summit – such as shifting from “not supporting” to “opposing” Taiwanese independence – the administration maintains that its posture on the ground remains the true measure of its commitment.
Xi’s gambit
Unusually, Taiwan didn’t come up at the last US-China summit, in October in South Korea. The people close to Chinese decision-making said Beijing calculated that the Korea meeting was too brief – with only about 90 minutes of actual talk time – to push it aggressively. Xi chose instead to focus on finalising a high-priority trade truce.
Improving ties with Beijing does not require being anti-U. S., while Taiwan’s survival depends on stable relations with China, Cheng Li-wun, the leader of Taiwan’s largest opposition party, said on Monday (March 23). Rachel Graham reports.
This tactical restraint also reflects a broader calculation in Beijing: that Trump’s own rhetoric on Taiwan suggests a more transactional, and perhaps less committed, US stance than the bipartisan consensus in Washington would allow.
“There’s still a bipartisan consensus that communist China is the leading threat to us internationally,” said Senator Pete Ricketts, a Nebraska Republican, during a January Council on Foreign Relations event, citing this as a reason for the need to “deter communist China from doing something like taking Taiwan by force.”
Trump has often bucked that consensus, framing the relationship with Taipei through a commercial lens. Over the years, he has repeatedly said that Taiwan stole the US chip industry.