For five decades, U.S. presidents have stuck to a choreographed set of norms around Taiwan, the most dangerous flashpoint in U.S.-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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. policy on Taiwan, the people close to Beijing’s decision-making said.
Xi sees Trump as unwilling to come to Taiwan’s defense, the people said—especially if America’s involvement in the Middle East, which has led the U.S. 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 utilize 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 U.S. 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 U.S. to “support China’s peaceful reunification,” according to Beijing’s account of the exchange. The Biden team didn’t oblige.
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 U.S. 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 neutralized 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 $13 billion 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 Feb. 4 call that the U.S. 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 U.S.-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 U.S. 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 U.S. was bound by the ambiguous One China policy, but later backtracked.
The inconsistencies reflected Trump’s early skepticism of Taiwan’s strategic value, former U.S. 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 U.S. “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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.’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 U.S. imposed steep new tariffs, Xi’s economic czar, 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 U.S.—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.
In the hyperspecific “verb politics” of the Taiwan Strait, the document contained a subtle but debated change: While the U.S. 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 Defense 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 defense 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 U.S.-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 finalizing a high-priority trade truce.
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, U.S. 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 Sen. 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 U.S. chip industry.
“If China takes Taiwan, they will turn the world off, potentially,” he said in a 2023 Fox News interview as he campaigned for another term. “But remember this: Taiwan—smart, brilliant—they took our business away. We should have stopped them.” In that same interview, Trump declined to say whether the U.S. would help defend Taiwan, noting that answering “would put me in a very bad negotiating position.”
Trump has publicly and privately argued that Taiwan should pay the U.S. for protection. While he has conveyed how serious his Chinese counterpart is about the issue, he has also suggested that his personal relationship with Xi acts as a temporary deterrent.
“He told me, ‘I will never do it as long as you’re president,’” Trump said in August, adding that Xi also said: “But I am very patient, and China is very patient.”
New narrative
For his part, Xi has made the island’s “reunification” the core pillar of his “China Dream” of national rejuvenation for the past 13 years. Now, facing significant domestic economic headwinds, the people close to Beijing said, the Chinese leader is under increased pressure to show progress toward that goal before he seeks a fourth term at the next Party Congress in 2027.
Early this year, Xi began using a new narrative on Taiwan. He has started framing its seizure as the final fulfillment of the 1945 postwar settlement—a victory he notes the U.S. and Chinese people achieved as allies in the defeat of imperial Japan.
When he sits down with Trump, Xi may also try to frame remarks by the current Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te that Taiwan and China aren’t subordinate to one another as a provocative “new two-state theory” that serves as a driver of regional instability, the people said.
China has normalized near-daily military incursions into Taiwan’s air-defense identification zone and systematically erased the “median line” in the Taiwan Strait that once served as an informal buffer.
China has said it wants its military combat-ready by 2027. A recent, unprecedented purge of top brass has led some analysts to speculate that the military remains less a ready invasion force and more the backbone of a strategy intended to exhaust Taipei’s psychological resolve and force a political collapse from within.
Taiwan loomed over last week’s meeting between Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. Takaichi suggested late last year that a Chinese attack on Taiwan would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan—raising China’s fury. Any Japanese intervention would likely drag the U.S. into the conflict via their mutual defense treaty.
The public rhetoric around Taiwan last week remained carefully restrained. Trump noted that Japan has a “little bit of an edgier relationship” with China, and said, “I’ll be speaking Japan’s praises when I’m in China…but we’re going to have some good talks.” Trump steered the public conversation toward Japan’s role in the Middle East, praising Takaichi for “stepping up to the plate” in the security of the Strait of Hormuz.
The two leaders issued a joint fact sheet stating that they “opposed any attempts to unilaterally change the status quo, including by force or coercion.” The quiet inclusion suggests that the foundational machinery of the U.S.-Japan alliance continues to signal a shared deterrent against Beijing.
Still, for the Japanese, as for the Taiwanese, the persistent worry is that the alignment is only as strong as Trump’s next deal.
