Xi Jinping and the Virtue of Patience
By Matthew Parish
Thursday 24 September 2026
There is a peculiar difficulty in writing sensibly about Xi Jinping in the West. The President of China presides over a political system profoundly antithetical to the liberal democratic tradition. China permits no meaningful national electoral competition, the Chinese Communist Party monopolises political power and Xi has concentrated personal authority to an extent unseen in China for decades. Independent journalism, organised political opposition and much of civil society exist only within boundaries determined by the Party. Freedom House describes contemporary China as a repressive authoritarian regime, while Human Rights Watch documents extensive restrictions upon expression, association, religion and political dissent, as well as grave abuses involving Uyghurs, Tibetans and Hong Kong.
Nevertheless, recognising these facts does not require pretending that Xi is an inept statesman. Indeed the opposite proposition deserves serious consideration. In his dealings with Donald Trump since the latter’s return to the White House, Xi has pursued a recognisably patient diplomatic strategy: absorbing pressure, retaliating where Beijing possesses leverage, avoiding permanent escalation where possible and repeatedly returning the relationship to negotiation between the two Presidents. Whether one approves of China’s objectives is a different question from whether one recognises the method by which Xi pursues them.
The extraordinary tariff confrontation of 2025 illustrates the point. Trump imposed new tariffs upon Chinese goods, Beijing retaliated and by April the confrontation had escalated spectacularly, with headline tariff rates reaching 125 per cent on both sides. Yet the confrontation did not remain there. Geneva negotiations in May produced a substantial temporary reduction, further negotiations extended the pause and the two Presidents reached another truce in South Korea in October 2025. Trump subsequently visited Beijing in May 2026, where the two governments announced new trade and investment mechanisms and China agreed to purchases of American agricultural products and Boeing aircraft. The pattern has therefore been one of confrontation followed by bargaining rather than an uninterrupted march towards economic separation.
Xi appears to have understood something important about Trump. The American President’s negotiating style places exceptional emphasis upon leverage, spectacle and personal diplomacy. An attempt to answer every American provocation rhetorically would risk creating an escalating contest in which neither leader could retreat without appearing weak. Beijing has instead frequently responded through instruments over which it possesses substantial practical leverage — agricultural purchases, market access and, most importantly, critical minerals and rare earths — while leaving open a route back to presidential negotiation. The Congressional Research Service has noted the increasingly important role of Chinese non-tariff measures and export controls in this bargaining relationship.
This is not submission. Nor is it friendship. It is the diplomacy of two enormous powers discovering the limits of coercion.
Xi’s formula for the relationship is revealing. During Trump’s May 2026 visit to Beijing he advocated what Beijing calls a relationship of “constructive strategic stability”: cooperation where possible, competition within limits and disagreements managed so that they do not destroy the wider relationship. That formulation obviously serves Chinese interests and should be understood as Beijing’s diplomatic language rather than an impartial description of Sino-American relations. Nevertheless it identifies the central strategic problem accurately enough. China and the United States can compete fiercely without necessarily permitting every commercial or technological dispute to become an existential confrontation.
The Washington summit of 24 September has brought this philosophy into unusually theatrical surroundings. Trump accorded Xi the elaborate ceremonial treatment of a state visit, including a formal White House arrival and extensive military honours. The symbolism matters because both men understand political theatre. Yet underneath the ceremony sit extraordinarily difficult questions: artificial intelligence, technology controls, trade, Taiwan and the war involving Iran. The trade truce has meanwhile been extended, preserving room for further negotiation rather than allowing the relationship to tumble immediately back into economic warfare.
Xi’s approach to Taiwan demonstrates both the strengths and the dangers of his diplomacy. Beijing continues to insist that Taiwan is the most consequential issue in Sino-American relations, and Xi again pressed Trump on 24 September to oppose Taiwanese independence. From Beijing’s perspective this is an irreducible question of sovereignty; from Taiwan’s perspective the matter concerns the survival of its democratic political order and its ability to determine its own future. Washington’s longstanding challenge has been to deter coercive changes to the status quo without converting deterrence into an unnecessary superpower confrontation. At the present summit, Xi has again placed Taiwan close to the centre of the bilateral relationship rather than allowing commercial détente to remove it from the agenda.
There is also a broader quality to Xi’s diplomacy that contrasts sharply with contemporary Western political rhythms: patience. Chinese statecraft can operate over considerably longer horizons than democratic electoral politics normally permits. Trump confronts congressional elections, public opinion and the ceaseless American news cycle. Xi does not confront competitive elections at all. That asymmetry gives Beijing an advantage in diplomatic endurance, although the source of the advantage is precisely one of the things democrats should find troubling.
Indeed this is where admiration for diplomatic technique must stop short of admiration for the political system that makes some of it possible. Xi’s freedom from electoral pressure exists because Chinese citizens cannot remove him through a competitive national election. The same political order that can pursue long-term industrial policy and foreign strategy without alternation of government also suppresses political opposition, heavily restricts independent media and subjects civil society to extensive Party supervision. Freedom House’s 2026 assessment gives China 9 out of 100 for political rights and civil liberties and describes the CCP as exercising tight control across government, media, online speech, universities, religion and business.
There are still darker dimensions. Human Rights Watch reports systematic restrictions upon fundamental freedoms, severe repression in Xinjiang and Tibet and the continued erosion of political freedoms in Hong Kong. Beijing disputes many international criticisms of its human-rights record, particularly allegations concerning Xinjiang, but the underlying absence of political pluralism, independent opposition and a free press is not seriously in doubt. One should therefore be wary of an old temptation in Western commentary: confusing the apparent efficiency of authoritarian decision-making with an argument for authoritarianism itself.
Xi’s diplomatic method may nevertheless contain lessons that do not depend upon accepting China’s political model. The first is that powerful adversaries must eventually talk. The second is that economic interdependence can be leverage but is also a restraint: China can hurt American companies and farmers, while America can hurt Chinese exporters and constrain access to advanced technology. Neither can inflict unlimited damage upon the other without paying substantial costs itself. The third is that a successful negotiation need not eliminate rivalry. Sometimes the achievement consists merely in constructing rules by which rivalry remains manageable.
This is particularly important because the United States and China are not merely trading partners. They are nuclear powers, technological competitors, military rivals in the western Pacific and the two largest national economies in the world. The Congressional Research Service observes that they also possess the world’s two largest defence budgets and are both permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. A relationship of this magnitude cannot sensibly be reduced either to friendship or hostility.
Xi’s intervention over the Iran conflict during his Washington discussions illustrates the same attempt to present China as both competitor and indispensable interlocutor. According to the Chinese account of the meeting, Xi urged Washington and Tehran to return to negotiations and argued that sovereignty and security should be respected. That position plainly advances China’s own strategic interests in the Middle East, and Beijing’s description of its role should therefore not be confused with an independent assessment. Yet the episode demonstrates Xi’s broader diplomatic ambition: China wishes not merely to resist American power but increasingly to participate in determining the rules under which that power is exercised.
The danger for the West is therefore not principally that Xi Jinping possesses some mysterious strategic genius. It is that Western governments may underestimate the effectiveness of consistency. Xi does not need every encounter with Trump to produce a Chinese victory. He needs to prevent temporary American advantages from becoming permanent strategic settlements, preserve China’s room for manoeuvre and keep negotiations alive long enough for circumstances to change. That is a more modest conception of statecraft than triumphalist propaganda suggests, but also a more formidable one.
There is an irony here. Xi governs through institutions that liberal democracies have powerful reasons to reject. Yet some aspects of his external diplomacy — patience, preparedness, willingness to distinguish temporary disputes from permanent interests and acceptance that rivals must continue talking — belong to no particular ideology. They are ancient principles of statecraft. Democracies can practise them perfectly well without censorship, political prisoners or one-party rule.
The spectacle in Washington therefore deserves to be viewed without either romanticism or caricature. Xi Jinping represents an authoritarian Chinese state whose treatment of dissent and political freedom deserves rigorous scrutiny. He is simultaneously a highly consequential practitioner of great-power diplomacy whose dealings with Trump show a consistent preference for controlled competition over uncontrolled escalation. Those two propositions can coexist.
Perhaps that is the most useful lesson of the present Sino-American encounter. One need not admire the Chinese political order to study carefully how its leader negotiates. Nor does acknowledging diplomatic skill excuse repression at home. The intellectually serious position is to hold both realities in view: an increasingly concentrated authoritarian system domestically and, abroad, a patient attempt to manage one of the most dangerous rivalries of the twenty-first century without allowing competition to become catastrophe.
