President Donald Trump's high-profile visit to China this week was 'a win for the Chinese and an embarrassment for Trump,' his biographer Michael Wolff has claimed, arguing that the Beijing summit laid bare the gulf between the US president's rhetoric and China's entrenched power.
Trump has spent the better part of a decade casting China as the villain at the heart of America's economic and political woes. From his first presidential campaign through his return to office, Beijing was presented as the adversary he alone could tame. Yet, as Wolff points out, China's economic, political and military influence has only expanded during what he calls '10 years of the Trump era,' complicating any attempt to sell the latest trip as a turning point.
