Xi pressed Trump to oppose Taiwan independence at White House summit

Beijing helped script KMT chairwoman’s April tour and her audience with Xi

A Wall Street Journal column published this week reports that Chinese leader Xi Jinping used his White House summit with President Trump to press for a shift in U.S. policy on Taiwan. According to the official Xinhua News Agency readout of the meeting, Xi urged Washington during the talks to hold to the “correct position of opposing Taiwan independence.”

The single sentence about Taiwan was easy to lose amid the pageantry, WSJ chief China correspondent Lingling Wei wrote, but it laid bare the issue Xi cares about most — and what Wei described as the prize he came to Washington chasing. The U.S. position adopted under the Biden administration is that Washington “does not support” Taiwanese independence, and Xi’s call, as Xinhua reported it, was for the “opposing” formulation.

Taiwan is the through-line of Xi’s ambitions, Wei wrote. A WSJ investigation published this week by Wei and reporter Joyu Wang found that Beijing is quietly working to bend the island’s political future toward the mainland by cultivating Taiwan’s main opposition party, the Kuomintang, at a moment when many Taiwanese are losing faith in Washington.

At the center of the investigation is Cheng Li-wun, the KMT’s new chairwoman, who in April took a red-carpet, six-day tour of the mainland capped by an audience with Xi. The WSJ reported that Beijing did not just host the visit but helped script it. Beijing’s aim, the WSJ investigation found, is to divide Taiwanese society and sow doubts about U.S. support.

The erosion of confidence is measurable. A recent Brookings Institution poll found that 24% of Taiwanese voters consider the United States a trustworthy ally, the WSJ reported. Beijing sees Trump’s second term as a “rare window of opportunity,” as one Taiwanese official told the newspaper, because the administration’s unpredictability on U.S. commitments gives China more room to operate.

Trump has at times echoed Chinese talking points, the WSJ reported, and for months has been sitting on a $14 billion arms package to Taiwan that he has openly called a “bargaining chip.”

There have been hints of a broader economic deal. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the Chinese floated a “bigger” economic package and that Washington is open to evaluating it, the WSJ reported. Read one way, that is leverage the U.S. holds; read another, it is currency Xi might spend. Beijing has weighed larger purchases of American farm and other products, the WSJ reported, and China holds cards Trump wants.

The “uncomfortable possibility,” Wei wrote, is a bargain each man could sell at home: a smoother economic relationship for Washington, and for Xi, an American president drifting toward China’s line on Taiwan. Nothing like that was immediately announced at the summit, the WSJ reported, but the drift is what Beijing is betting on.

In a personal reflection, Wei wrote that during time in Taiwan this summer, what stayed with her was not the politics but the texture of ordinary life — incense in Taipei temples where people burn offerings and whisper prayers, a meal in Taichung so fluent in Chinese tradition it left her dazed, “and yet set out simply to be enjoyed, not to prove a point.”

“What I saw in Taiwan was a free, unshowy democracy holding on to what it values,” Wei wrote. “You can choreograph a state visit. You can script a politician’s remarks. Whether you can talk 23 million people out of a life they have chosen is the much harder question — and the one this week’s careful diplomacy left unanswered.”