This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Day one of the summit in Beijing between President Donald Trump

and Chinese leader Xi Jinping yielded no substantive agreements, but statements from the two sides

following their first meeting reflected differing priorities. While the U.S. side emphasized hope

for productive trading relationships between the countries, the Chinese statement

warned that if the issue of Taiwan was not handled properly, it could put the U.S.-China relationship

in, quote, an extremely dangerous situation. For some perspective on the issues that will

frame further discussions, we turn to Rush Doshi, a China expert who worked on the National

Security Council in the Biden administration. He wrote last fall that when Trump launched

his trade war against China in 2025, he mistook political theater for strategy, lost ground

to his adversary, and made it clear that China now stands as America's true peer

in geopolitical rivalry. During his tenure at the National Security Council, though she coordinated

U.S. government policy on China and Taiwan, drafted the administration's China strategy and negotiated

with Chinese counterparts. He's now an assistant professor in Georgetown's

School of Foreign Service, a senior fellow and director of the China Strategy Initiative at the

Council on Foreign Relations, and author of The Long Game, China's Grand Strategy to Displace

American Order. We recorded our interview yesterday.

Rushdoshi, welcome to fresh air. Thank you. Great to be here.

You know, we read news about tariffs and trade wars, and it can be hard to follow, hard to

see it in context, see how meaningful the latest move is. But you had a remarkable piece a few months back about what happened in this

trade war between the U.S. and China and argued that there was a moment when China really proved

that it was America's equal. This was, it began, you know, in 2025 in the second Trump administration,

when President Trump began using tariffs, one of his favorite tools, and hit China particularly hard imposing tariffs as high as 140 percent, how did China respond?

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