Although the heated summit between the presidents of the United States and China ended with smiles and handshakes between the leaders of the two powerful countries, the two-day meeting in Beijing appeared to be more serious about the event than the specifics.
Donald Trump and Xi Jinping each boasted of great achievements in their speeches, yet announced little in the way of results that could be described as concrete.
“We've made great, great trade deals for both countries,” Trump told reporters in Beijing on Friday.
“President Xi and I agree on a lot of things, and we agree a lot on trade. We're going to do a lot of trade,” Trump said as he boarded Air Force One on his way back to the US.
Such excitement about trade with China is the departure of a president who has been cheering the country for a long time the main cause of the loss of American jobs.
Trump recently ripped into Prime Minister Mark Carney for a deal that would allow 49,000 Chinese-made electric vehicles to enter Canada at a lower cost — an import deal that amounts to less than 4 percent of the 1.3 million cars and trucks made in Canada each year.
William Klein, the former US ambassador to China who helped organize President Donald Trump's trip to Beijing in 2017, says that although all the goals of the successful summit were followed, it is difficult to say what the two countries agreed on.
Although Trump is portraying the summit as a major economic success for the US, analysts analyzing public statements are struggling to find evidence of a major change.
“It's a summit where signs trump substance,” said Rush Doshi, director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank in Washington and a former National Security Council adviser to the Biden administration.
Managing problems, not solving them
“The focus was on managing the problems, not on solving the existing problems between the US and China,” said Doshi in a press conference on Friday.
Those issues include a high-profile trade war between the two countries that saw huge tit-for-tat rates and China's refusal to supply rare earth minerals vital to America's tech industry until a one-year deal was agreed last October.
Mona Paulsen, a trade lawyer and assistant professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, cautions against drawing too many conclusions from what Trump and Xi have said publicly.
“My position is, until I see something on paper, to think nothing has changed,” Paulsen told CBC News.
“We now need to see if everything will be just talk or will be followed by some legal measures,” said Paulsen.
The only specific deal Trump announced during the conference was China's commitment to buy 200 airplanes from American aircraft manufacturer Boeing.
'Strategic stability' is the new phrase for China-US
Markets appeared disappointed by the limited scope of that deal: after Trump announced it on Thursdayay, Boeing's stock price fell by more than four percent.
For perspective: what Boeing is doing is not much bigger than the deal announced last week for Malaysia's AirAsia to buy 150 Canadian-made Airbus 220 jets.
However, China expressed satisfaction with the outcome of the conference.
“We agreed on a new vision for a constructive relationship between China and the US for strategic stability, and reached an important mutual understanding on maintaining stable economic and trade relations,” said a statement from the Chinese government.
US President Donald Trump praised trade progress with China as he praised President Xi Jinping, who spoke bluntly in a veiled warning that mishandling the Taiwan issue could put China-US relations back in jeopardy.
Although constructive, “strategic stability” may sound vague to outsiders, it is actually the most important achievement from the Beijing summit, said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank.
The term “signifies a change in US-China relations towards a positive direction,” Sun said Friday from Beijing, during an online forum.
'Board of Investment' announced
He also added that it is possible that many concrete announcements from the conference will be made in the coming weeks.
That could include things like Chinese investment in the US and perhaps some sort of tariff reduction, based on what Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told a post-summit news conference.
Trump and Xi agreed to establish a “Board of Trade” and “Board of Investment,” Wang said, as well as expanding two-way trade, under what he called a “framework of complementary tax cuts.”
Aboard Air Force One on Friday, Trump said he and Xi “didn't discuss taxes.”
A Bloomberg report last fall that China was looking to invest up to $1 trillion in the US in exchange for tax breaks gained new legs ahead of the summit when some key figures in Trump's Make America Great Again movement expressed concern on social media.
Trump administration officials have indicated that any potential investment by Chinese companies is not close to that.
The “Investment Board” will jointly decide which “non-strategic, sensitive” economic sectors in the US will be eligible for Chinese investment, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC during the conference.
Bessent said the deal under consideration would reduce tariffs on an estimated $30 billion worth of Chinese imports, which he described as “low-end consumer goods” the US has no interest in domestically producing.
Trump was accompanied to the conference by a team of senior managers of some of the largest technology and investment companies in the US – which is worth 16 billion dollars, according to their calculations of capital markets.
These are people who are already doing business with China and want to do more. It all casts doubt on whether dismantling the US economy in China – Trump's rhetoric for years – is still on the agenda.
Sitting a few kilometers from mainland China, the Kinmen Islands are Taiwan's most intimidating neighbors. On the National, CBC's Chris Brown goes to the region to find out how people are preparing for a war they hope will never come.
Robert Manning, another member of the Stimson Center's China Program who has advised Republican administrations on national security issues since the 1980s, says that under Trump America has reached a new level of willingness to negotiate with China.
“America's attitude toward China has been changing well before the summit,” Manning said.
“I think what Xi wanted more than anything in this summit was predictability and stability, and I think, ironically, Trump, who is often an agent of chaos, seems to want that.”
That could explain why Trump has not publicly committed to a $14 billion U.S. arms sale to Taiwan that was approved in January by Congress pending presidential approval.
“I will make a decision in the next short period of time,” he told reporters on Friday.
Trump said Xi had proposed an arms deal during their meetings, but said he was not committed to changing US policy on the island. The US has been selling arms to Taiwan since the late 1970s.
