The Tables Have Turned

When US President Donald Trump visited China in 2017 it wasn’t on the same terms than now. Then the country was stable inside and out and the US was far from the strong power it is now. To see what has changed we look at an article from the Gatestone Institute:

The Washington Post this week reported that Xi Jinping, on the eve of his summit with President Donald Trump, is "confident in China's power." The country, from the outside, looks strong. Xi's inward-facing actions, however, betray a deep sense of insecurity. Trump can take advantage of it.

According to one source the messaging is strong:

As Yanzhong Huang of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in the New York Times on May 10, Xi has created and reinforced ridiculous narratives of American decline inside the "information cocoon" the Communist Party has created. For instance, the notion of an "American kill line" — millions of American families are "teetering on a precipice" where they are "one lost job, illness, or unexpected expense away from ruin" — has taken hold in China.

He notes that their rhetoric is ridiculous:

"Insular, nationalist voices are amplified more than ever," Huang writes. "Zhang Weiwei, a university professor who served as Deng Xiaoping's interpreter and has millions of online followers, absurdly claimed in a viral video in January that China is the only country in the world whose people eat well."

That is hardly the truth, but the Chinese leaders needt people to believe it:

Why the hostility? The Communist Party is in defensive mode. Its leaders have no other way to justify their failures than to denigrate others, primarily the United States.

Reality Bites

The internal feelings of the populace is where the fight is being waged:

China's people have largely lost hope, and it is not hard to see why. The regime's leaders, says Dan Wang, author of Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, "treat society as a big engineering project, where people are yet another building material that the leadership just want to tweak and destroy if necessary."

China's people — to the regime "building material" — are now extremely unhappy in the Communist Party "engineering state." Gloom, as a result, has descended over Chinese society.

According to another source, the people are far from seeing themselves as they are portrayed:

"As a leader of a totalitarian—not simply authoritarian—regime, the Communist Party controls narratives domestically," Piero Tozzi, senior director for China Policy of the America First Policy Institute, told Gatestone on May 10. "It is increasingly difficult for it to dispel the nationwide awareness of malaise."

The pervasive pessimism has resulted in people "lying flat" — embracing a "low-desire life" — or "retiring" — leaving cities to work on farms. In one way or another, the Chinese are opting out of society.

People are signaling their feelings online and it’s not good:

The University of Pennsylvania's Victor Mair has collected other words and phrases for leaving society, including "Buddha whatever," "Kong Yijiism," and "involution." "China today has so many memes for opting out," he wrote in July 2023. Young educated Chinese constantly find new ways to show discontent. People with resources, not surprisingly, are leaving China.

Chinese population numbers are not growing and what they report may not be accurate either:

The gloom is most fundamentally reflected in the country's collapsing demography. Beijing reports the county's population was 1.4 billion at the end of last year. The UN's median estimate for turn-of-the-century population is 633.4 million. Others, such as Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have issued far lower numbers. "Left unaddressed," Yi wrote, "China's demographic trap could precipitate a civilizational collapse."

"China has embarked on a road of demographic no-return," wrote Wang Feng of the University of California, Irvine.

An Expected Response

Their leader is taking actions to stem the tide, but rather than lifting the people up, they’re pushing and controlling them:

Xi Jinping has responded to the unhappiness in society by initiating a censorship campaign against "excessively pessimistic sentiment." Most significantly, he is not willing to implement structural changes to put more money in the pockets of the laobaixing, the common folk. Xi's control and surveillance mechanisms, in their totality, are especially merciless. Those people with low social-credit scores have been completely cut off from society and must sleep in the streets.

China’s intelligentsia are also speaking out:

No wonder China's intellectuals and social media users refer to this moment as their country's "garbage time of history."

"These days, there is a sense of bitter anger among the people at being the voiceless victims of the state's obsession with world power and beating the United States," wrote Helen Gao in the New York Times in November 2025.

What they should do is suggested:

What does Huang of the Council on Foreign Relations suggest? Deterrence and "restoring the human connections that once helped hold the relationship together."

Will they do it? Probably not. And regrettably, Trump can only do so much:

Xi, however, has been determinedly cutting links with foreign parties, a tactic Chinese leaders have used through millennia when they felt pressure from the outside threatened their rule. There is little the U.S. can do in this situation. It cannot force Xi to reestablish these links.

Xi sees America and their way of life as a threat to them, not an inspiration to change:

Unfortunately, Xi considers the United States an existential threat not because of anything Americans say or do but because of who they are. An insecure ruling organization in Beijing is afraid of the inspirational impact of American values and form of governance on the Chinese people. This means, try as Americans might, their democracy will never have amicable relations with China as long as it is ruled by the Communist Party. When Xi is worried about contact with the outside, it is hard to engage his regime or society. Trump is confronting a brittle China in Beijing this week.

Politics aside, what China really needs is Jesus. With an estimated 25 million believers, the Church in China still exists. The house church is pressured but persistent. The Chinese Church is not free in the Western sense, but it is not defeated. Pray that Trump’s visit will lift up their spirits and that they will see more light than darkness from it.