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The US President Donald Trump has rolled out the red carpet for his Chinese counterpart this week, the first time that President Xi Jinping has been to the White House in more than a decade. Jennifer Hsu is an associate professor and Program Director of Research and Policy at the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University. She says that the visit shows the relationship between the global superpowers is stable for now.

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00:01I think this has been an important show that relationship is stable for the now, especially
00:10when President Trump is coming up to the midterm elections.
00:13This is good domestic optics, as well as it is for President Xi Jinping, where he prides
00:20himself as being seen as peer power to the US, so the rolling out of the red carpet and
00:26the pageantry definitely plays well for Xi's domestic optics as well.
00:32President Trump values strongmen like President Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, so this rolling
00:40out of the red carpet, the meeting him by plain sight as Xi Jinping descended the steps,
00:49shows us that he values this kind of relationship, especially around the pageantry as well.
00:54So, I think by the end of the year, they will have met four times, which indicates that
00:59there is value that President Trump finds from these relationships.
01:04Substance is a different story.
01:06Right.
01:07Expand on that.
01:08What do you mean by that?
01:09So, in the May summit, we saw a range of agreements, however small or big they were for China to
01:19agree
01:20to in terms of purchasing more goods from the US.
01:23The trade truce, which they have agreed to, will be extended for only two months, as was
01:29agreed in this particular meeting.
01:31No more.
01:32President Xi Jinping had wanted it to extend possibly till the end of President Trump's term.
01:38But the extension of two months suggests that the US is unhappy with China keeping its end
01:46of the bargain that is purchasing more goods from the US.
01:49I think from the personal side, the one-on-one side, there is probably good rapport.
01:54But in terms of the bigger geopolitics, there is strategic competition between the US and China,
02:00particularly around AI.
02:03As we have seen this week, there's great concerns across all spectrums within Australia,
02:09within the world about the capabilities of AI.
02:13However, beyond that, we know that the US and President Trump has said that they want
02:19to out-compete China on AI.
02:22So I guess there is a little bit of tension between or maybe a dichotomy between how President
02:29Trump feels about President Xi Jinping and the broader aspects of their US-China relationship.
02:36We've heard President Xi Jinping saying the need to put guardrails around artificial intelligence.
02:43I think for President Trump, there isn't that acknowledgement as such, the need to go full steam ahead.
02:49I think part of that pronouncement on President Trump's part is that the underlying current
02:57of the need to beat China, the need to stay ahead, to stay supreme in the US's sort of stage
03:05on AI.
03:07So I think there's that tension that we need to look for in the future.
03:11So, what's going on here?
03:13You
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