China hawks grumble over Trump’s lavish welcome planned for Xi state visit
But the China hawks who helped shape the debate have spent the week warning that the ceremony risks obscuring a more familiar reality: Beijing remains a rival, and the issues that have defined that rivalry have not gone away.
They are making that case from outside the room. Since Trump returned to the White House, the chorus has lost resonance inside the building and with the public. The US president has disputed their arguments himself while calling Xi a “great gentleman”.
Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, told senators on Tuesday that “quite frankly, had the White House asked me for advice, I would have suggested the president not invite Xi Jinping to Washington for such a lavish welcome”.
Wicker reminded Trump that “his guest” sought to dominate his “neighbours and whose massive military arsenal is aimed directly at the United States of America”.
He also demanded the “America first” president raise reports during his meeting with Xi about Chinese satellite imagery allegedly used in Iranian strikes that killed American troops.
Michigan Republican John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on China, wrote to Trump on September 18, saying that China remained “the United States’ foremost foreign adversary and greatest external threat”.
Enabling Iran to use the images to hit US forces was “tantamount to an act of war” and should bring “the most severe consequences”, the letter continued. Beijing’s objections to Taiwan arms sales should be “rejected out of hand”.
Democrats, too, have focused on what they see as the gap between the pageantry and the underlying tensions.
Senators Jeanne Shaheen, Chris Coons, Jack Reed, Mark Warner, Elizabeth Warren and Andy Kim said on Tuesday that China presented “a greater threat to American security and prosperity than ever before”.
They also cited the Iran imagery and AI chips, accusing Trump of “rolling out the red carpet for President Xi and hosting closed-door dinners so his billionaire friends can strike deals”.
The objections are not confined to Capitol Hill. Outside Congress, China hawks and former government officials have been making a parallel case, focusing less on the policy details than on what the lavish welcome says about the balance of power.
Conservative commentator Gordon Chang, who regularly appears on Fox News, warned on social media that many would see the welcome “as the US acknowledging China as the world’s No 1 power”.
“Xi, after all, did not greet Trump on his arrival in Beijing in May. This special treatment will make Xi even more arrogant,” he said.
Trump has already waved him off, taking a shot during an interview with Fox in April. “You know, I listen to this Gordon Chang. He has no idea what he’s talking about. We have been very tough on China. Tough but fair.”
But Rush Doshi, who ran China policy on former president Joe Biden’s National Security Council, reads the choreography of the visit as evidence of a deeper imbalance in the relationship.
In a Substack post on Monday, Doshi noted that the honours planned for Xi exceeded those Trump received during his visit to Beijing.
“Trump will be waiting for him … then comes a flyover by a B-2 and four F-22s and a meeting between Melania Trump and [China’s first lady] Peng Liyuan,” Doshi wrote, noting that nothing quite like that happened when the US leader went to Beijing in May.
“Xi wasn’t waiting for him, there were no flyovers, and there was no meeting of the first ladies,” he observed, adding that “reciprocity” was the Trump administration’s “watchword”.
“The asymmetry in pageantry reveals something about an overall asymmetry in the relationship.”
Xi to get presidential airport welcome from Trump during US visit starting Wednesday
For Doshi, the ceremony is a window into how the relationship itself may be changing. He argues that Beijing believes it has gained leverage through rare earth export controls, while the Trump administration has increasingly prioritised stability.
He predicts that the meeting is unlikely to produce many major deliverables – perhaps an extension of the trade truce, some agricultural and energy purchases and an AI dialogue. On Taiwan, “Trump’s informal, unscripted remarks may be as consequential as any formal change”, he argues.
China hawks have had less say over the tone and choreography of policy towards Beijing in the second Trump White House.
Paul Heer, a former US national intelligence officer for East Asia, wrote this week that even the remaining China specialists inside the administration, including “hawks … probably frustrated with Trump’s more accommodative approach … have yet to forge a policy consensus”.
The public mood has shifted too.
A Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey released on Monday found Americans rating China at 39 on a 0-to-100 feeling thermometer, up from 26 in 2024.
Fifty-seven per cent said they favoured “friendly cooperation and engagement” with China, while 40 per cent wanted to limit China’s power. The share describing Chinese territorial ambitions as a “critical threat” fell to 41 per cent from 52 per cent in 2022.
“There’s not a bipartisan consensus among the public in favour of a competitive containment approach,” said Craig Kafura, the council’s director of public opinion and foreign policy.
The hawks want a harder line. Other China specialists are asking a different question: whether the welcome is anything more than a show.
Trump praises Takaichi ahead of Xi’s US visit
Denis Simon of the Quincy Institute called the welcome “unusually conspicuous,” but said it did not “necessarily reflect the real substance of the relationship”.
That Xi was making his first state visit to Washington in more than a decade “helps explain why former officials and China hawks are objecting to the optics. In their minds, China is the enemy,” he said.
According to Simon, the test will be whether the administration’s negotiating positions are tougher than Trump’s rhetoric.
“On AI, for example, the administration continues to confront China over advanced technology even as Trump has pursued a less restrictive approach to some chip exports,” he said.
In Simon’s view, the question that matters is less “why is Trump being so nice to Xi?” than whether the cordiality produces “concrete US gains, and what happens when the personal relationship collides with unresolved structural disputes”.