Miles Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute and one of the most influential China policy voices in Washington, published a pointed analysis on March 16, 2026, explaining why the Chinese Communist Party treats every summit with an American president as a strategic weapon. Drawing on two essays previously published in The Hill, Yu laid bare a pattern that has held across U.S. administrations: the CCP exploits diplomatic spectacle to prop up Xi Jinping’s legitimacy at home while working to demoralize American allies across the Indo-Pacific. His analysis landed as speculation intensified around a possible Trump-Xi summit in 2026.
Yu cut to the heart of the CCP’s summit obsession in his post. He wrote that the U.S.-China summit had once again become a major news story, and directed readers to two earlier articles where he dissected what he calls Beijing’s “summit worship” and explained why it repeatedly fails to produce results.
The first article, published May 2, 2024, on the Hill website, carried the title “Blinken’s Rebuff in Beijing Is Part of China’s Long-term Strategy.” The second appeared on Nov. 14, 2023, timed to then-President Joe Biden’s meeting with Xi Jinping at the APEC summit in San Francisco. That piece was titled “How China Uses Summits to Advance Its Real Agenda.”
Yu identified a pattern that holds regardless of who occupies the White House. CCP leaders have long harbored a special enthusiasm for summits. These meetings are routinely billed as “strategic dialogues” between China and its main adversaries, yet they are almost never designed to resolve specific disputes. The CCP uses them as platforms to rescue its domestic credibility, broadcast its global vision, and coax other world leaders into adopting Beijing’s narrative and policy framework.
Xi Jinping’s domestic legitimacy crisis is driving his desperation for a Trump-Xi summit in 2026
One passage in Yu’s analysis explains, with striking precision, why Xi Jinping’s government has been so eager to secure a summit with President Donald Trump this year.
Success
You are now signed up for our newsletter
Success
Check your email to complete sign up
The core reason is simple: Xi faces a crisis of domestic legitimacy. Years of punishing pandemic lockdowns and misguided fiscal policies pushed China’s economy to the brink, and public anger has been accumulating ever since.
Yu wrote that Xi’s desperation to meet the leader of the free world stems from rising domestic fury. Xi wants to broadcast a message to a public ground down by economic stagnation and tightening political control: with the help of the CCP’s relentless propaganda apparatus, their supreme leader is respected, even revered, on the world stage.
Beijing has a second, more calculated motive, Yu continued. The Chinese Communist Party hopes to demoralize America’s key allies across the Indo-Pacific region.
Yu cited the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam, and Taiwan. These nations face persistent harassment and intimidation from China’s modernized military forces, sometimes on a daily basis. By staging warm, high-profile interactions with the American president, the only leader whose country can realistically counterbalance Chinese expansion, Xi aims to shake the confidence of U.S. allies and weaken their will to resist.
Xi Jinping’s strategy, however, has gone horribly wrong this time. Whether by deliberate design on Trump’s part or by sheer coincidence, the prospect of a Trump-Xi meeting has become a lure that Trump has dangled to Beijing’s visible embarrassment. The world has watched as the bait bobbed up and down while the CCP scrambled to keep up. This round of summit diplomacy has humiliated Xi.
The CCP weaponizes US-China negotiations to attack American values and global leadership
In practice, the Chinese Communist Party has turned the very act of negotiating with the United States into a weapon.
Yu pointed out that Beijing uses every round of U.S.-China talks as a stage to attack American global influence and its foundational values, while simultaneously promoting the CCP’s authoritarian model to a world that, in Beijing’s telling, has lost its way and needs the guidance of “Xi Jinping Thought.”
The result is a self-perpetuating cycle of engagement without results, one that poses a serious threat to global stability.
For the CCP, negotiation functions as a stage for weakening America’s reputation and leadership. Every call for cooperation gets transformed into a display of moral posturing that casts the United States as the adversary and oppressor in a carefully constructed victim narrative.
Yu then arrived at the most critical point of his analysis. He called, with evident urgency, for the United States to abandon the practice of quiet, behind-the-scenes diplomacy with Beijing.
This asymmetry in how the two sides approach conflict resolution, Yu wrote, is the defining feature of the U.S.-China relationship, trapping both sides in a loop of interaction without progress. To escape it, the United States must confront the CCP’s ideological hostility directly. Washington can no longer conduct back-channel conversations while pretending to be ignorant of the Chinese Communist Party’s broader agenda and its deeply embedded anti-American ideological convictions. The competition between the two countries has moved beyond questions of governance. It is a clash of ideologies and political systems: freedom against authoritarianism, open markets against command economies, a rules-based order against revisionism.
The path forward demands courage and clarity, Yu continued. The United States must publicly challenge the CCP’s moral posturing, its hypocrisy, and its propaganda, exposing Beijing’s true intentions to the world. The time has come to strip away the veneer of diplomatic politeness and confront the ideological roots of the U.S.-China conflict. Failure to do so will only embolden the CCP’s increasingly aggressive agenda and erode the principles that free societies hold dear.
The urgency of this task cannot be overstated, Yu concluded. Time does not favor those who believe in justice. Hesitation will only allow the Chinese Communist Party to consolidate its narrative and corrode the foundations of the global order. To secure the future of freedom and democracy, Washington and its allies must act now, meeting the CCP’s bankrupt ideology and habitual dishonesty with equal resolve.
By Jianyi
