Donald Trump’s trip to Beijing landed with a mix of bold leverage abroad and urgent counterintelligence work at home, set against a China that is weaker than the media headlines suggest.
Trump arrived in Beijing with a high-profile corporate delegation and a tight agenda: trade, technology, rare-earth export controls, Taiwan, the Iran war, and artificial intelligence. He is the first sitting American president to visit since 2017, and Xi Jinping is expected to return the visit later this year. Big outlets rolled out a familiar narrative framing the trip as fraught and favoring China, but that picture misses key leverage Washington has built.
The rare-earth story is real: China controls roughly 85 percent of global rare-earth processing, and Beijing has used that leverage to push back against U.S. tariff moves. Still, the broader balance of power is not as bleak for America as many commentators claim. The leverage Trump assembled comes from energy, sanctions, and a harder posture in multiple theaters.
Iran is a central example. A string of actions over the last year weakened Iran’s regional reach: Iran’s supreme leader is dead, the American Navy controls the Strait of Hormuz, and American and Israeli strikes degraded key air-defense batteries inside Iran. The long-promised Iran-China cooperation pact delivered nine billion dollars against a four-hundred-billion-dollar pledge, and Chinese diplomats made dozens of outreach calls with little to show.
Energy is the lever that bites Beijing. Tanker tracking shows roughly 1.38 million barrels of Iranian crude flowed to China per day in 2025, about twelve percent of Chinese crude imports, even while official Chinese customs reporting claimed zero Iranian crude since 2022. Under secondary sanctions, China-Iran trade fell by half in the first quarter of 2026, and March was down nearly eighty percent year over year. Those are tangible hits to Beijing’s options.
At home, the press keeps pushing the narrative of a confident China, but Beijing’s own numbers tell a different story. The government set a 2026 growth target of 4.5 to 5 percent, the lowest in about thirty-five years. China has recorded three consecutive years of falling consumer prices and faces a near sixteen percent drop in real estate development investment, while youth unemployment sits at 16.3 percent.
Official fixes are piling up: Beijing announced 1.3 trillion yuan in emergency bonds, imposed retail price controls on gasoline and diesel for the first time since 2013, and told state refiners to tap commercial reserves as transport fuel costs spiked. Analysts in the West suspect the actual picture is worse because the government has quietly cut data series that highlight weakness.
China’s military hardware has also stumbled across several theaters. Reports note recent combat failures for Chinese-built systems in India-Pakistan clashes and elsewhere, including missiles that failed to hit targets and air defenses neutralized within minutes. Those operational setbacks ripple into buying decisions, as seen when countries chose American F-16s over Chinese jets after watching performance in other conflicts.
The domestic espionage picture is equally serious. Over the past eighteen months, prosecutions and arrests reveal a steady campaign of Chinese intelligence activity inside the United States at every level of government and the uniformed services. Cases include a sitting mayor charged with acting as an illegal agent, a former Navy sailor sentenced to two hundred months for espionage, and multiple soldiers arrested for selling classified materials.
These cases are not isolated anecdotes. They follow earlier incidents dating back to the Fang Fang matter and the Eric Swalwell episode, which helped sharpen counterintelligence tradecraft. Federal filings and committee reports documented more than sixty CCP espionage cases across twenty states between February 2021 and December 2024, and the FBI called China the most significant counterintelligence threat to the United States.
Every successful operation by Chinese intelligence translates into lost American advantage: policy access sold at the state level, ship systems leaked to foreign navies, and military technical data that undercuts U.S. force posture. The cost is paid on deployments, in factories, and at the ballot box when representatives act under foreign influence rather than national interest.
Containment is the right strategy until the ideological threat fades. That means maximizing leverage abroad, which the Trump administration has built, and sustaining aggressive counterintelligence at home, which prosecutors and the FBI are pursuing. Both strands are necessary: diplomatic muscle at the summit and prosecution of spies on American soil.
The trip should produce a functional working relationship that constrains Iran’s nuclear ambitions, asserts U.S. seniority at the table, and protects American technology and supply chains. Trump arrived in Beijing with concrete leverage; the task now is to turn that leverage into durable outcomes while keeping Chinese intelligence from eroding what America wins abroad.
