President Donald Trump shakes
hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping as he arrives before dinner at
the Mar-a-Lago resort on Thursday. (Alex Brandon/AP)
Senior government delegations led by U.S.
President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping were initially
tight-lipped about the results of their two-day meeting last week at
Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Cabinet members like Treasury Secretary Steven
Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson initially agreed to speak to reporters off-camera, and a White
House pool report indicated some sort of 100-day trade plan had been
ironed out and that China had agreed to increase cooperation in reining
in North Korean military provocation.
But questions remained as to just what that
trade plan would entail and, more broadly, what specific progress Trump
and Xi had made over the course of their two days in Florida.
And days later, few other details have emerged suggesting anything concrete was knocked out in Mar-a-Lago.
"To my understanding, as of now, there is yet to
be any black-and-white fact sheet or communique or the like to have
come out of this meeting," Nate Olson, director of the Stimson Center's
Trade21 initiative, said at a Stimson Center event Monday.
During a debriefing event hosted by Olson's
policy think tank, analysts speculated that the public is still in the
dark over the U.S.-China summit in part because the Trump administration
is shaping up to be less of an open book than the government was under
President Barack Obama.
Some also wondered if the lack of information was simply caused by the lack of substantive news to share.
"I was surprised. I think we've all been spoiled
by the Obama administration, which produced endless documents for ...
these things," William Reinsch, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson
Center and the former president of the National Foreign Trade Council,
said Monday at an event hosted by the Stimson Center. "It just may well
be that this administration is not going to do it that way. The more
cynical view would be there is no fact sheet because there are no facts,
and there's nothing to come out with."
Many analysts expected some degree of secrecy to
shroud Trump's and Xi's conversations, in part because of China's tight
control of domestic media and in part because Trump in recent weeks has
repeatedly indicated he doesn't "have to tell" the press what he's
doing behind closed doors.
But few expected such a degree of radio silence.
"President Trump has been saying that he's going
to be negotiating with China to have a grand bargain and strike deals,"
said Yun Sun, a senior associate at the center's East Asia program.
"He's favoring negotiation and his ability to strike deals, so when
people don't see those concrete deliverables, there is a question that
people ask."
The White House did eventually end up
distributing a read-out of Mnuchin's, Ross's and Tillerson's comments,
and press secretary Sean Spicer's office hours later issued a statement
describing the meetings as "positive and productive."
But even those added details and quotes didn't
offer up much short-term gratification. And in explaining the U.S.-China
100-day trade plan during a press briefing Monday, Spicer said "the
plan was to put together a plan, and there's a lot of pieces that both
sides would like to see in there."
"This is an initial working plan that they're
going to try to hammer out what that 100 days looks like," Spicer said.
"It is something that the counterparts are now going to continue to
flesh out."
In other words, the goal at the end of the 100-day plan appears to be a moving target that hasn't been pinned down yet.
"They haven't really defined an acceptable
outcome either. So it's not clear what will be a satisfactory outcome in
terms of the administration's point of view," Reinsch said.
Still, the general consensus at Monday's event
seemed to be that Xi's and Trump's meeting was far from fruitless.
Reinsch noted expectations were low for any kind of overarching policy
shift to come from the first meeting between the leaders of the world's
largest economies and that the gathering was expected to be more focused
on relationship building. He ultimately said it's important not to
"move the goalposts here."
"I think both sides were clear in stating that
the primary goal of the summit was to establish a good working
relationship … and to establish a framework for future discussion," he
said. "They didn't yell at each other as far as we know, and they
presumably had frank exchanges."
Additionally, the summit did appear to result in at least some short-term news. The Financial Times
over the weekend reported that Beijing had offered to make it easier
for U.S. financial services investments and beef exports to make their
ways into the Chinese market, citing unnamed Chinese and American
officials. Spicer appeared to confirm that offer during his Monday
briefing.
Reinsch indicated the beef trade tweaks could
mean "a lot of money" for U.S. ranchers but that it'll be "difficult" to
say "how meaningful" the financial services adjustments will be without
more public information.
"The reality of doing business in China is that
there are a whole bunch of ways you can limit access to the market," he
said, noting that reducing barriers in one area or another doesn't
necessarily guarantee meaningful progress.
Still, he said there's "not much" to talk about
in the way of what the 100-day plan will mean and what else was actually
accomplished at the summit, calling the public comments "extremely
paltry." He said it's "traditional, particularly with Chinese summits,
for there to be … concrete deliverables."
"I was struck by the fact that it does seem to
be, if there was anything delivered, there would have been a tweet and
there would have been a lot of bragging about it," Reinsch said. "The
fact that there was no tweet along those lines and no bragging suggests
there was nothing that had been delivered.
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