Chinese officials seek rest accommodations for Xi at Trump summit

China has no institutionalized process to choose Xi’s successor

Chinese officials made unusual demands that the U.S. accommodate Xi Jinping’s need for rest during his summit with President Trump, according to people familiar with the visit planning. The Wall Street Journal reported that the arrangements offered a rare glimpse of the 73-year-old leader’s emerging physical limitations.

Chief among the requests was a private room inside the West Wing where Xi could take a break between events, with only his wife, Peng Liyuan, permitted to join him, the people said. No others from the Chinese delegation were allowed to use the “hold room,” as it was called — not even Cai Qi, Xi’s chief of staff, they added.

About a month before Xi embarked on the trip, his advance team also declined a working lunch between the Chinese leader and Trump planned for Sept. 24, the only full day of the summit, the people said. When Trump visited Beijing in May, the two leaders had a working lunch in the Zhongnanhai leadership compound. Beijing officials told their American counterparts they preferred more time for Xi to rest during his Washington visit, the people said.

The result was a roughly five-hour gap in the summit agenda, a long stretch of downtime during a visit that lasted barely two days. The Chinese delegation also arranged no activities for Xi on the evening of his arrival, and Xi spent only about 10 minutes inside the National Archives on the final day of his visit, Sept. 25, far less than U.S. officials had planned.

Xi had just completed a roughly 14-hour flight from Beijing, and jet lag alone could account for some of the schedule adjustments, particularly on the night of his arrival, The Wall Street Journal reported. By comparison, when Trump — now 80 — was in Beijing for a summit earlier this year, his team scheduled blocks of executive time over two days, according to a government digest of presidential activities. Trump conducted interviews with Fox News during some of that downtime, according to the digest.

Xi received the full pageantry of a state visit: a 21-gun salute, a flyover of U.S. jet fighters and a stealth bomber, and a gift in the form of a large bald eagle statue. But behind the stagecraft, his own team was building a schedule around how long he could stand, how far he could walk and when he would need to stop, the people said.

Dennis Wilder, a former senior China director at the National Security Council who organized three state visits during the George W. Bush administration, said the hold-room arrangement was unprecedented. Wilder, who helped arrange visits by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Hu Jintao, Xi’s predecessor, said, “we never did anything like that. This is unusual.”

Questions about Xi’s physical condition aren’t new. Similar speculation arose after his 2019 European tour, when video appeared to show him walking with a slight limp and using the arms of a chair to steady himself. More than six years later, Xi remains firmly in control of China, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Xi’s health carries weight far beyond his personal well-being. He has concentrated more power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong and has designated no successor. China effectively has no institutionalized process for choosing a leader who holds Xi’s three important titles: Communist Party secretary-general, president and chairman of the China Central Military Commission.

During the Washington visit, Xi’s cautious movements were visible in the unedited footage. As he descended the stairs from his plane at Joint Base Andrews, he reached for Peng with one hand while gripping the rail with the other. Two days later, climbing the steps of the National Archives alongside Trump and the first lady, the couple held hands again throughout the ascent, with Xi appearing to rely on Peng for physical support rather than simply holding her hand. Chinese state media edited those moments out of its prime-time coverage. Xi has also long held Peng’s hand during official occasions, an unusual gesture for a Chinese leader that state media has highlighted as a sign of the couple’s devotion to each other.

Before the Washington visit, questions about Xi’s health had been building. At the Brics summit in India earlier in September, Xi skipped a gala dinner attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin and other world leaders because he wasn’t feeling well, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Wilder, now a professor in Asian studies at Georgetown University, said the truncated schedule for the meeting between Trump and Xi also stood out. The two leaders’ bilateral session at the White House on Sept. 24 started close to noon and ended by early afternoon; after that, Xi left the White House grounds and didn’t return until the state dinner that evening, which also featured American business leaders including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. “That’s amazingly short for a summit like this,” Wilder said of the limited time allotted for substantive discussions between the leaders of the world’s two largest economies.

The health of China’s top leaders has always been treated as among the most closely guarded state secrets, a tradition rooted in the Communist Party’s belief that any perceived weakness at the top could invite factional challenges or destabilize its grip on power.

Analysts specializing in Chinese leadership say they see no signs of cognitive decline in Xi’s public appearances. “There is a huge difference between a leader who can’t function completely due to a severe stroke and a leader who is physically impaired but mentally can function,” said Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College who studies Chinese elite politics. In the first case, Pei said, the party would have to find a successor quickly. In the latter, he said, the party would have to wait and policy would be unlikely to change much, as during Mao’s final years in power before he died at age 82.

Still, questions of succession pose risks even beyond China’s borders. Jockeying for power among those eager to succeed Xi, Pei said, could lead some factions to advocate aggressive policies to gain an edge in an internal-power struggle.