Trump Says Xi 'Understands' His Taiwan Position as Beijing Presses for a US Statement Against Independence

After his summit with Xi Jinping, President Donald Trump said the Chinese leader "understands" the American position on Taiwan. He gave no indication of any change in that position, even though Beijing's readout recorded Xi's explicit request that Washington "oppose" Taiwan independence rather than merely not support it. The distinction between those two verbs has been the substance of the dispute for three decades, and it survived the meeting intact.

Analysts who reviewed the visit described the summit as more spectacle than resolution, with limited movement on trade and none on Taiwan. The most concrete item to emerge was a proposal, put forward on September 20, for a hotline through which each government would notify the other of national-security risks arising from artificial intelligence systems.

That proposal comes as both governments remain deeply suspicious of the technology itself. The New York Times reported that in China, warnings about catastrophic artificial-intelligence risk are widely read as a distinctly Western preoccupation or as a tactic to prevent Chinese companies from overtaking American rivals. Chinese researchers and officials who take the risks seriously must argue against that assumption at home, which limits the basis on which any joint safety mechanism could be built.

What the two governments did agree on is the frame: intense competition without military conflict. That limits how far escalation can go, but it is not a settlement, and it leaves export controls, Taiwan and technology standards unresolved.