The handshake is the product. Edward Howell's Spectator piece on Xi's Washington visit (link below), is blunt about what sits under it: Beijing will stage "stabilised relations with the global hegemon" and leave the worldview untouched. That worldview still treats the West as structurally hostile, still treats Taiwan as a domestic matter that can justify collision, and still treats North Korea as an asset to be managed, not a problem to be solved.

That is not the same as a movie villain in "kung fu shoes." It is colder and more useful to Beijing. Crushing the United States in one theatrical stomp would be a war Xi has spent a career trying not to fight on unfavourable terms. Outlasting it, hollowing its alliances, and making "stability" conditional on Washington yielding the one issue that matters to the Party, that is the actual programme.

In May, the White House readout talked Iran and North Korean denuclearisation. Beijing's narrative talked Taiwan. Xi's formulation was a warning dressed as a deal: relations can "remain generally stable" if the "most important issue" is handled well; mishandle it and the two countries "will collide or even come into conflict." Stability, in that sentence, is not a shared public good. It is a concession Washington must keep making. Taiwan is the invoice.

North Korea shows the same pattern. China once mediated Six-Party Talks. It now barely says the word "nuclear." Xi's visit to Pyongyang this year omitted denuclearisation. Short-range missiles toward Japan's EEZ drew no Chinese rebuke. Sanctions evasion and tens of thousands of North Korean workers in China continue. A nuclear neighbour that pins US forces, rattles Seoul and Tokyo, and can be blamed on American "provocation" is no longer a thorn. It is a tool. If Trump trades drills with South Korea for a photo with Kim, Beijing will call that American decline and pocket it.

Other reporting this week matches Howell more than the red-carpet coverage. Chinese researchers talk "strategic stability" as optics plus time. Brookings-style analysis says Xi is not chasing breakthroughs; he is buying space to harden the domestic economy and the industrial base for whatever comes after this White House. Exports have kept running through the tariff war. Trump is constrained by an Iran war, midterms, and a preference for leader-to-leader theatre. Xi answers to no electorate. Patience is leverage.

Xi is not interested in a stable equilibrium in which the United States remains first among equals. He is interested in a stable interval in which China accumulates the things that make later coercion cheaper, chips, shipyards, energy, a fractured US alliance net, and a Taiwan question that Washington has been trained to treat as the price of calm.

Undermining the order that made China rich while still selling into it is not a contradiction in Beijing. Howell's closer is the right one: the next "Made in China" label may be North Korean labour in a Chinese plant. The system that enriched the Party is also the system the Party intends to revise until the West "loses out." That is not a secret speech. It is the record on Taiwan, on the treaty ally in Pyongyang, and on political-economic pressure toward Tokyo, Seoul and London.

What "crush the US" would actually mean:

make US security guarantees look optional by peeling exercises and attention toward other wars;

make Taiwan the tripwire that Washington is told it must not touch if it wants "stability";

keep a nuclear proxy that America cannot disarm without Chinese help China will not give;

wait for US political cycles to do what a PLAN landing cannot yet do.

Trump's own rule from The Art of the Deal, which Howell quotes, is leverage. The cameras will get the toast. The question worth asking in the room is who is using the interval, and for what. Xi can smile at a tarmac greeting he did not fully reciprocate in Beijing. He does not have to want a concert of equals to want a quiet year. Those are different wants. Only one of them is compatible with the United States staying the pole of the system it built.

https://spectator.com/article/xi-has-no-interest-in-stabilising-relations-with-trump/.