Why Xi's decision to talk to Trump during trade crisis speaks volumes

South China Morning Post

6 hours ago

Chinese President Xi Jinping's decision
to speak to US President Donald Trump directly last week, the first such call in four months, spoke volumes about the importance to Xi of finding a way through the morass of Sino-US relations.
Xi's decision ran counter to the long-standing Chinese diplomatic approach during Sino-US tensions of the Chinese president refusing calls from the US president despite persistent entreaties. The White House had repeatedly predicted a Xi-Trump phone call only to fall silent when it did not materialise.
Xi was almost certainly wary of speaking to Trump because of his
track record of
embarrassing foreign leaders , but I believe the central reason is rooted in the risk aversion in ties with Washington that has characterised Chinese foreign policy since the normalisation of relations in the 1970s.
When I recently asked a Chinese academic why it is so hard for Xi to pick up the phone, he said that direct leader-to-leader negotiations in a time of crisis were not in the DNA of the Communist Party leadership.
The historical record gives us ample evidence of this. As student protests rocked Beijing in 1989, ultimately ending in military forces
suppressing the movement in Tiananmen Square, US president George H.W. Bush repeatedly requested a phone call with China's paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. The Chinese refused.
Perplexed, Bush asked my China analytic team at the CIA why Deng would not take his call and why, during the crisis, Deng had disappeared from public view. Bush wondered whether he was sick or had been ousted. We explained that we had intelligence he was still in charge but that it was typical of Chinese leaders to 'go to ground' during a domestic crisis and not reappear or talk to foreign leaders until they were sure that the situation had stabilised.