President Donald Trump greeted China’s President Xi Jinping last week with a flourish of extravagance that reflects Trump’s apparent belief that personal flattery and lavish treatment create goodwill and leverage with the Chinese leader. But Chinese leaders do not interpret obsequiousness the way Trump seems to think they do. They are more likely to interpret it as weakness — and as evidence that their strategy of bluff and bluster is working.
The Chinese Communist Party has been working overtime to present China as an unstoppable economic and technological power. Artificial intelligence has become particularly useful to this narrative. China’s advances in AI are real. So are its accomplishments in electric vehicles, batteries, robotics, drones, solar panels, and advanced manufacturing. But the Trump administration, along with other Western governments, much of the business world, and many economic and political analysts confuse the technologically sophisticated portions of the Chinese economy with the Chinese economy itself. China remains a mostly poor, mostly uneducated, aging society riven with internal inconsistencies. Only a sliver of its population is involved in the tech sectors that have the world so mesmerized.
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