Trump-Xi summit bade farewell to ‘China plus one’

President Donald Trump rolled out the red carpet for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington, greeting him in person at Joint Base Andrews, a rare gesture for an American president.

Critics in both parties warned that the pageantry would reward a rival. However, the red carpet, the state dinner with its exquisite menu, the cannon salute and the bald eagle sculpture as a gift for Xi were just the surface. Beneath them, the bilateral relationship has begun to take a new direction.

At their Beijing summit in May, the two leaders agreed to build a “constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability.” Each word carries weight. “Constructive” commits both sides to a positive agenda, not just damage control. “Strategic” places the relationship at the level of leaders and long horizons. “Stability” sets a direction and boundary for the relationship.

This week this new formula began to look like a working plan, sharply different from the language used to describe US-China relations since 2018.

During Trump’s first term, Washington launched a trade war, imposed tariffs on Chinese goods and placed Huawei and other firms under technology sanctions. Washington urged multinational companies to quickly adopt “China+1,” moving out of China and building a second supply base in Vietnam, India or Mexico. It trumpeted “decoupling” as the goal.

Since 2018, Beijing has gradually diversified its trade across Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. US-China trade fell by around 30% in 2025 alone, according to the McKinsey Global Institute’s 2026 update on the geometry of global trade. Meanwhile, China built a complete and strategically critical supply chain, from basic materials to advanced equipment.

China is now the only country with all 41 industrial categories and 666 sub-categories in the United Nations classification. It sells advanced machinery, components and critical materials to other countries’ factories. McKinsey calls it the factory to the world’s factories, and the Wall Street Journal has reported on the same shift.

India, Vietnam and Mexico have become assembly lines of Chinese products. In many ways, China+1 did not remove China from the global supply chain. Instead, it has helped China move up the value chain.

The most telling change is in Washington’s vocabulary. In August 2023, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said that China was “uninvestable.” This was a deliberate act of talking China down and became the talking point of politicians and China hawks across Washington.

For years, “de-risking,” “de-coupling,” “friend-shoring” and “China+1” filled congressional hearings, cable interviews and opinion pages. However, China+1 has nearly vanished in Washington. No one among the administration’s senior officials and business executives uses the term anymore. Washington has effectively bid China+1 au revoir.

This is easy to see from who sat at the head table at the Trump-Xi gala dinner. Beside the two presidents were titans of American tech, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, AMD’s Lisa Su and Tesla’s Elon Musk. All of them understand how critical China is to their businesses, both as a market and as the base of their supply chains.

Apple’s first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, was developed, trial-produced and assembled exclusively in China, according to Apple’s vice-president for Asia procurement and operations. It was not built in India or Vietnam.

Tesla announced to phase Chinese suppliers out of its American-built cars. Now it is seeking multiple suppliers in China for its Optimus humanoid robot, and orders have already been placed. Huang has argued for months that export controls are backfiring on American competitiveness. Su has pledged to deepen AMD’s engagement in China. These executives all know that China+1 and decoupling from China are not working.

Smaller firms follow the same logic. EnerVenue, a California battery startup, announced last week that it began mass production in Changzhou after abandoning plans for a US$264 million factory in Kentucky.

Its chief executive cited China’s skilled workforce and supply chain strength, and called China the “factory of factories.” Chinese business media have also reported cases of American manufacturers that moved orders to India or Southeast Asia to avoid tariffs, struggled with quality and delivery, and returned the work to their original Chinese suppliers.

The toasts at the Trump-Xi dinner affirmed the new direction, especially in people-to-people and business-to-business ties. Both leaders reached back into history. Trump spoke of a foundation of commerce and mutual respect, and of ties between the two peoples that endure.

Xi recalled the trade that began soon after American independence and the Hump airlift over the Himalayas during the war against Japan. He recalled Ping-Pong Diplomacy, and the redwoods Richard Nixon gave China that now grow in Zhejiang. He praised Ronald Sakolsky, an American teacher who donated US$5,000 to fund a Chinese woman’s desert tree-planting two decades ago and recently returned to China to see a forest in the desert.

Xi’s most strategic move was his remark that Trump’s Make America Great Again and China’s pursuit of national rejuvenation “can surely be mutually reinforcing.” This strategic discourse targets the idea that dominates Washington’s thinking about the US-China relationship: the Thucydides Trap, which holds that a rising power and an established one inevitably head for war.

Xi’s remark rejected that premise and offered an alternative frame. Two great projects of national renewal need not collide. He called for “a new approach for major countries to get along.”

None of this means rivalry and competition between the two great powers have or will slow down. In July, the Federal Communications Commission added foreign-made humanoid and industrial robots to its covered list, a move Beijing condemned.

Chip export controls remain unchanged. China’s rare earth magnet shipments to the US fell 21% in August to 512 tons, heading toward their lowest level since 2021. Taiwan, Iran and AI safety will test the newly coined constructive relationship of strategic stability. But both leaders have endorsed its guardrails.

While Trump 1.0 started decoupling and China+1, Trump 2.0 now regards China as an equal partner in deals, a critical supplier the American economy cannot easily replace, and the other half of the only G2 that matters.

The festivities at Andrews and in the East Room will soon fade from the headlines. But the story that matters is that Washington has stopped talking about leaving China while corporate America never really left.

Xin Wang is professor of Chinese Studies and director of Asian Studies at Baylor University.