Trump’s State Visit To Beijing And The New Cold War On Asia

By Tings Chak

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Thurs. May 14, 2026: From Beijing this week, the first US state visit to China in nine years is being staged for the world to see. The Great Hall of the People is open to Donald Trump, who has traveled with eighteen US executives – Apple, Tesla, BlackRock, Boeing, and Nvidia among them. A state banquet on Thursday, followed by tea and lunch on Friday.

On the streets of Beijing, ‘the Beast‘ has been securing the motorcade route since last week, flown in by C-17 ahead of Trump’s arrival to meet with Chinese president Xi Jinping. The international mainstream press is calling this a thaw between Washington and Beijing. Trump’s actions seem to speak otherwise.

Encountering a Different China

The last US state visit to Chinese soil was Trump’s own, in November 2017 – at the start of the US-imposed trade war that would deepen under Biden and intensify in his second presidency. The China that received him then was still learning to respond to the aggressions. The China that receives him now has spent nine years diversifying its export markets, building supply chain autonomy, developing the technological leverage to push back, while turning towards Global South countries. Trump’s failed tariff war against China ended up hurting its own economy and people more than China’s, and Beijing’s export controls on rare earth elements ultimately forced Trump to back down. The eighteen US executives in the delegation, including Tim Cook, Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, have come because their companies cannot do without the Chinese market. The economic instruments of US containment have not produced the result Washington wanted.

The War on Iran

Since 28 February, the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran—which postponed this summit by six weeks – has killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and thousands of Iranian civilians. Meanwhile, more than 2,700 civilians have been killed in Lebanon, where US-Israeli strikes continue.

In retaliation against the US-Israeli aggression, Iranian missiles and drones have struck fifteen US military sites across Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – Al Udeid Air Base alone hit by 44 missiles and 8 drones, with 217 structures damaged or destroyed and an estimated $5 billion in repair costs. In its eleventh week, despite the US naval blockade and bombings, Iran has mounted sustained resistance and the war has not gone as Washington predicted. It has made unmistakable what anti-war movements across our region have long argued: the bases sold to host nations are not shields but targets.

In the days immediately before his arrival, Trump rejected Tehran’s peace proposal as ‘garbage‘. On 11 May – the eve of his departure – the US Treasury sanctioned twelve more individuals and companies over Iran-China oil trade, and the same day, a group of US senators urged Trump to approve a new $14 billion arms package for Taiwan.

Beijing has not been silent. On 2 May, in answer to an earlier round of US sanctions on five Chinese refineries, China invoked its anti-sanctions Blocking Rules for the first time since their introduction in 2021: the US measures “shall not be recognized, enforced, or complied with” within Chinese territory. The Chinese Foreign Ministry called them illegal and unilateral, without basis in international law. Though the defiance was not unconditional – Chinese banks have been quietly advised to limit exposure to the sanctioned refiners—the public position is clear. In the same week, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi received Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi in Beijing. China remains Iran’s largest trading partner and the principal buyer of its oil.

An Architecture of Containment

Iran is not the only war backdrop. Across the region, the architecture of US military presence is being expanded and accelerated. The same week of Trump’s visit, the largest joint military exercises in Philippine history concluded – Balikatan 2026, with seventeen thousand foreign troops from seven nations, Japanese anti-ship missiles positioned on Filipino soil, and a new US fuel depot in the south of the country. In central Luzon, the Philippines has granted 4,000 acres in New Clark City to the Pax Silica Initiative—a US-controlled high-tech zone operating under US common law and granted diplomatic immunity, on a lease renewable for 99 years.

On 28 April, the commander of US Forces in Korea, General Xavier Brunson, told the Japan Times that Washington is building a ‘kill web‘—a networked system fusing Korea, Japan and the Philippines into a single architecture against China, Russia and North Korea. In August 2025, Trump told reporters of the US base at Pyeongtaek that he would like to “get ownership of the land where we have a massive military base” in South Korea, a country where the US has 66 military bases. In Japan, military spending is being doubled – the largest rearmament since 1945 – with 400 US Tomahawk missiles purchased, a project that has continued and accelerated under right-wing Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. For Taiwan, Trump authorized $11 billion in arms in December, the largest package in history, and has told the press he intends to discuss arms sales—with Xi himself.

From Hyperimperialism to Hands off Asia

What is on display in Beijing this week is not a thaw, and the executives traveling with Trump are not a sign of moderation. The economic and military aggression against China are two halves of the same project of containment. This is hyperimperialism: an empire turning increasingly to force as its economic dominance erodes, with China and other Global South countries defending their sovereignty as the primary targets. Trump’s transactional style is not a departure from US imperialism but the form it takes when its economic instruments no longer deliver.

The Hands Off Asia campaign, launched on 30 April—the anniversary of the liberation of Vietnam—by the International People’s Assembly and partner organizations across our region, calls for the removal of foreign military bases from Asia, the cancellation of aggressive pacts like AUKUS and the Quad, and the redirection of military spending towards the needs of our peoples. The architecture being expanded across our region was not built to protect the people but to encircle China and discipline the rest of Asia. As Trump arrives in Beijing this week, no deal signed at the Great Hall will hide what his administration is building across our region—and the peoples of those places, from Okinawa to Subic, from Pyeongtaek to Tehran, see this war-mongering for what it is and oppose it, calling for: Hands off Asia.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was produced by Globetrotter. Tings Chak is the Asia co-coordinator of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and co-editor of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought. She is based in Beijing.

Source: Globetrotter