Before Trump arrives, Beijing’s room to manoeuvre is expanding

Trump’s delayed trip to Beijing was supposed to buy Washington time. It may instead be buying room for Beijing. The summit, originally set for 31 March to 2 April and now reset for 14 to 15 May, was pushed back because the Iran war was consuming American attention and bandwidth.

Even after a ceasefire framework was announced, the conflict has not been cleanly stabilised. The Strait of Hormuz remains a live problem, shipping has been badly disrupted, and negotiations are moving under distrust rather than closure. That matters because the delay is not just a scheduling issue. It has widened the political and strategic space in which Beijing can shape the atmosphere before Trump arrives. 

The point is not that China suddenly possesses a single decisive card. It is that several previously separate sources of leverage are becoming usable at the same time. Some were already there: rare earths, supply chain centrality, purchasing power and a greater capacity than many market economies to absorb external shocks through state direction. Some have been sharpened by the Iran war, which has stretched Washington’s attention and raised the value of actors that can cushion energy shocks or remain inside regional diplomatic loops. And some have become more visible in China’s own neighbourhood, where developments around Taiwan, the South China Sea and North Korea are giving Beijing more room to shape context even without securing any dramatic breakthrough. 

Trade is still the clearest place to begin. Trump’s broadest tariff weapon was weakened when the US Supreme Court ruled that the emergency law he had invoked did not authorise sweeping tariffs of that scale. Washington is trying to rebuild pressure through narrower investigations and fresh legal routes, but that is a different bargaining environment. The US still retains major economic tools and serious coercive capacity. Yet China is no longer negotiating under the shadow of an unconstrained presidential tariff hammer. That changes the texture of the pre-summit bargaining. 

That helps explain why the recent economic talks have looked narrower and more transactional than transformative. The US-China meetings in Paris were described as “remarkably stable” and focused on agriculture, energy, Boeing aircraft, rare earths, and possible mechanisms to manage trade and investment frictions.

This is not the language of structural settlement. It is the language of bounded bargaining, where both sides still have pain points to impose and incentives to cap escalation. Beijing does not need to dominate that process to benefit from it. It only needs to ensure that the meeting takes place on terms less one-sided than Washington had originally hoped. 

The Iran war has made that easier. Trump’s recent remarks on Hormuz underscored that the maritime problem remains unresolved even under the ceasefire framework. The White House’s own hesitation over how publicly to present the truce showed how fragile and unclear the arrangement still is. In strategic terms, the war continues to drain US attention, military bandwidth, and political capital.

For Beijing, that does not create omnipotence; China remains exposed to energy volatility too. But it does create a wider environment in which Washington has stronger reasons to avoid simultaneous escalation with China, while regional actors have more reason to keep Beijing in the diplomatic loop. 

That broader setting makes Taiwan more significant. Taiwan’s main opposition Kuomintang chairwoman Cheng Li-wun’s trip to the mainland has moved beyond symbolic opposition outreach. On 10 April, she met Xi Jinping in Beijing, where Xi repeated that Taiwan independence would not be tolerated, while Cheng cast her visit as a mission for reconciliation and institutionalised peace across the Strait.

The significance lies not in any imminent cross-strait settlement. It lies in Beijing’s ability to widen the political frame before Trump arrives. China is reminding Washington that Taiwan is not politically reducible to Lai Ching-te’s line alone, and that there are still powerful forces inside Taiwan arguing that peace cannot rest only on military buildup. 

That matters because Taiwan’s internal divide is no longer abstract. The opposition-controlled legislature continues to stall Lai’s proposed US$40 billion special defence budget despite pressure from visiting US lawmakers. Beijing’s gain here is not control over Taiwan. It is the ability to complicate American assumptions about Taiwan’s political trajectory and to foreground an alternative narrative of dialogue, restraint and internal contestation.

Yet the limits of Beijing’s approach are also obvious. On the same day Xi met Cheng, Taiwan reported 16 Chinese warplanes near the island. Beijing is not replacing pressure with diplomacy. It is combining them. But from Beijing’s perspective, that dual-track approach still helps shape the political atmosphere before the summit. 

The South China Sea tells a similar story in a more pragmatic register. Under pressure from the Middle East conflict, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr declared a national energy emergency on 24 March. Days later, Manila and Beijing unusually resumed high-level talks under their bilateral consultation mechanism, discussing not only maritime tensions but also oil and gas cooperation, fertiliser, agriculture, renewable energy and wider economic issues. That was important not because it signalled reconciliation, but because it showed that crisis conditions were pushing the Philippines back toward functional engagement with China even amid unresolved confrontation at sea. 

But Manila has not softened its strategic line. In March, it publicly rejected Beijing’s claim to sovereignty over the entire South China Sea. It signed a visiting forces agreement with France, adding another external security partner as tensions with China persisted. And on 9 April, the Philippine Coast Guard activated a new command centre in the Spratlys.

The real story, then, is not a Philippine turn toward Beijing. It is tactical elasticity: Manila is talking to China where energy, fisheries, shipping, and oil and gas require it, while simultaneously hardening its balancing posture. That distinction matters. Beijing does not need the Philippines to abandon balancing behaviour in order to gain useful room before Trump’s visit. It only needs a less frozen and more manageable South China Sea environment, and a limited thaw under pressure serves that purpose. 

The Korean peninsula now belongs more visibly to this same pre-summit setting. Wang Yi’s 9 to 10 April trip to Pyongyang was his first publicly known visit as foreign minister since 2019. It followed the resumption of passenger rail and Air China links between Beijing and Pyongyang, and came with explicit Chinese language about strengthening strategic communication and preparing commemorative activity for the 65th anniversary of the China-DPRK alliance treaty. 

During the visit, Wang met both North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui and Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, while Kim called for stronger ties. That does not prove that Beijing and Pyongyang have already agreed on a concrete North Korea bargain to place before Trump. But it does show that Beijing wants the Korean issue more firmly back inside the diplomatic atmosphere of the summit, while reducing the risk of unwelcome disruption and reminding Washington that movement on the peninsula still runs in important ways through China. 

What is taking shape, then, is not Chinese dominance but a broader Chinese ability to shape timing, context and diplomatic framing across several theatres at once while Washington is distracted by the Iran war and still searching for a controlled path into the May summit.

Taiwan remains contested. The South China Sea remains dangerous. North Korea remains unpredictable. US technoeconomic pressure remains real. But before Trump arrives, Beijing has more ways to influence the setting in which the meeting occurs than Washington likely expected when the trip was first conceived. In the current moment, that widening of strategic space may matter more than any single bargaining chip.

Related: China visit before Trump: Can Cheng Li-wun rescue the Kuomintang? | Is Trump a disrupter or a stabiliser in US-China relations? | Control the oil, shape the world: Trump’s disruptive diplomacy and the risks for Taiwan