So Donald Trump went to Beijing, and we didn’t even get a stupid T-shirt. If we had, it might have come with a purposefully incomprehensible slogan, absent any sound or fury but definitely signifying nothing. It might, for example, have featured the phrase “constructive strategic stability,” which is how Chinese President Xi Jinping describes a (marginally) improved relationship with the United States. In the deeply coded discourse of superpower relations, I think that translates into vigorous competition and disagreement, but without an actual shooting war. Which, if I’m not mistaken, is precisely the status quo.
Or maybe our souvenir T-shirt could repurpose Xi’s observation, during a speech on Thursday, that Trump’s promise to make America great again “can go hand in hand” with his own self-defined mission: the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” That got Fox News talking heads and Republican officials very excited, since they have all apparently forgotten that up until roughly a week ago they were supposed to be relentless China hawks who favored 145 percent tariffs and blamed Xi’s regime for spreading the global “hoax” of climate change.
