Trump landed in Beijing this week. He is the first sitting American president to make the trip since 2017. Trump made that one too. He brought a corporate delegation: Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Fink, and Boeing chief executive Kelly Ortberg. The stated agenda covers trade, technology, rare-earth export controls, Taiwan, the Iran war, and artificial intelligence. Xi is expected to visit the United States later this year.

The big outlets have one frame for the trip and they are all running a version of it. The Washington Post led Monday with "Xi, confident in China's power, is ready to host an unpredictable Trump." Time ran "Why Trump's China Trip Is Set Up to Fail" the previous week. The Council on Foreign Relations posted "At the Trump-Xi Summit, China Will Have the Upper Hand."

The rare-earth argument is real. China still controls roughly 85 percent of global rare-earth processing, and Trump has twice in the last year softened tariff escalations after Beijing threatened export restrictions on those minerals. CFR is not making that up. But the frame is still wrong twice. It is wrong about the strength of the American hand abroad, and it is wrong about what is happening at home.

Trump's leverage going into the meeting

Trump built American leverage against China. I documented it across four columns last month — the ceasefire, Hormuz, Friedman's meltdown, and Walz in Barcelona. Iran's supreme leader is dead. The American Navy controls the Strait of Hormuz. American and Israeli strikes destroyed Russia's flagship air-defense batteries inside Iran on day one. Iran's regional reach is gone. China's foreign minister worked twenty-six phone calls trying to find someone who would pick up. The twenty-five-year Iran-China cooperation pact delivered nine billion dollars against a four-hundred-billion-dollar promise.

The lever that bites China is energy. Tanker tracking data shows roughly 1.38 million barrels of Iranian crude flowing to China per day in 2025, about twelve percent of all Chinese crude imports. Chinese customs has officially reported zero Iranian crude since 2022. The Chinese government relabels the barrels as Malaysian. Under the secondary sanctions Trump put in place, Chinese customs data shows total China-Iran trade fell by half in the first quarter of 2026, with March alone down nearly eighty percent year over year. The defense secretary announced on April 16 that Beijing had given the White House high-level assurances it would not send weapons to Iran. That concession came before the handshake.

The press has the score backward. China is in real trouble.

None of those frames survive what has happened to the "Chinese century" story over the last eighteen months.

Beijing cut its 2026 growth target to 4.5 to 5 percent, the lowest the country has set in roughly thirty-five years. China has run three consecutive years of falling consumer prices, the longest such stretch since China opened to markets in the late 1970s. Real estate development investment is down nearly sixteen percent year over year. Youth unemployment sits at 16.3 percent. Beijing announced 1.3 trillion yuan in emergency long-term bonds to backstop infrastructure and consumer spending. And those are the official numbers. Beijing is publishing fewer economic statistics than it used to and quietly cutting categories that show weakness. Analysts in the West assume the real picture is worse than what Beijing prints. When a communist government stops publishing data, it is not because the news is good.

Beijing imposed retail price controls on gasoline and diesel, the first time it reached for that tool since 2013. Fuel prices rose eleven percent anyway. Transportation fuel costs jumped ten percent month over month in March. Beijing told state refiners to tap commercial oil reserves. European economic analysts have warned of social unrest.

Chinese-built military hardware has failed in combat across three theaters in the last eighteen months. In May 2025, during India's air war with Pakistan, China's flagship air-to-air missile saw its first combat use and could not score a single hit. Several missiles came down in India intact. Their self-destruct charges had never fired. Indian kamikaze drones destroyed Pakistan's Chinese-built air defenses, and the Indian Air Force jammed the rest of Pakistan's Chinese-supplied air defense network in twenty-three minutes. The next March in Iran, American and Israeli strikes destroyed Russia's flagship air-defense batteries on day one. In Venezuela in January, an American operation captured Maduro and Beijing did nothing. Argentina chose American F-16s over Chinese jets after watching Pakistan.

This is the actual state of the Chinese century on the day Trump landed. The major American outlets writing about Xi's confidence today were writing about Chinese ascendance through 2024. They were wrong then. They are wrong now.

The pattern at home

Trump built American advantages over China that have not existed in a generation. China's intelligence operations inside the United States are the one thing that can take those advantages away. The work is plain. Bust the spy rings. Keep the pressure on the commies.

The cases on file over the last eighteen months involve every level of American government and every branch of the uniformed services.

On Monday, the Justice Department charged the sitting Democratic mayor of Arcadia, California, Eileen Wang, with acting as an illegal agent of the People's Republic of China under the federal law that makes it a crime to work for a foreign government in secret. Wang resigned the same day. Her plea is on file. By her own admission, she took pre-written articles from Chinese officials over encrypted messaging, posted them under a local-news byline at a Chinese-American community news site, and addressed her handler as "Thank you leader." Her co-defendant is serving forty-eight months in federal prison. Her contact, who had personally met Xi Jinping, is serving twenty months.

In Albany, a former senior aide to Governor Hochul and previously to Governor Cuomo faces eight federal counts, including failure to register as a foreign agent, visa fraud, alien smuggling, and money-laundering conspiracy. Her Brooklyn trial ended in a mistrial in December. The retrial is pending.

In San Diego, the Justice Department in January sentenced a former Navy sailor to two hundred months in federal prison, sixteen years and eight months. Chinese intelligence recruited him through social media in 2022 by posing as a naval enthusiast. He transmitted more than sixty technical and operating manuals on American Navy ship systems for roughly twelve thousand dollars.

At an Army base in Washington state in March 2025, federal prosecutors arrested three soldiers who had sold classified hard drives, long-range artillery data, and armored vehicle materials to Chinese contacts. In June, prosecutors charged two more operatives running Chinese intelligence recruitment aimed at American military service members. Last summer, the Justice Department charged five Chinese researchers at the University of Michigan with smuggling biological materials and pathogens into the United States on academic visas. In July, Italy extradited one of China's top cyber operatives to Houston on a nine-count federal indictment.

None of those were the first case. The first case in the public record came earlier. Between 2011 and 2015, a Chinese intelligence asset known as Fang Fang cultivated Bay Area Democrats. She placed an intern in Congressman Eric Swalwell's office and fundraised for his 2014 campaign. The FBI gave Swalwell a defensive briefing in 2015. He stayed on the House Intelligence Committee throughout, because Nancy Pelosi kept him there, until Speaker McCarthy removed him in 2023. House Ethics closed its probe in May 2023 without action. That case is what taught American counterintelligence what to look for. The cases since are what they found.

The chain is not isolated. The House Homeland Security Committee documented more than sixty Chinese Communist Party espionage cases across twenty states between February 2021 and December 2024. FBI Director Kash Patel told the Senate Judiciary Committee in his September 2025 opening statement that China is the most significant counterintelligence threat to the United States. The Bureau made nearly sixty counterintelligence arrests in the first half of 2025 alone, a thirty percent year-over-year increase. And the Bureau is not doing the work alone. Federal prosecutors at the United States Attorneys' offices are charging the cases. House Oversight Republicans are running the document trail and demanding answers on the full scope of CCP infiltration of American government institutions.

A century of bracketing communism's victims

The same outlets writing about Xi's confidence today have been getting communism wrong for almost a century.

In 1932 the New York Times Moscow bureau chief, Walter Duranty, won the Pulitzer Prize for his Soviet coverage. He wrote in print: "There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be." He wrote: "Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda." An American Embassy memo later documented a private 1933 conversation in which Duranty acknowledged: "It is likely that last year ten million people died in the USSR, directly or indirectly, from food shortages." Ukrainians call that famine the Holodomor. It killed an estimated four million people. The Times in 1990 conceded Duranty's reporting was "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." The Pulitzer Board has declined to revoke the prize.

In August 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member, named Alger Hiss before a congressional committee investigating Soviet espionage. Hiss was a senior State Department official who had helped organize Yalta and the founding of the United Nations. He denied everything. The press treated Hiss as the credible party and Chambers as the unreliable accuser. The second of two trials convicted Hiss of perjury in January 1950; the statute of limitations had run out on the underlying espionage charges. He maintained his innocence the rest of his life. In July 1995, the National Security Agency declassified the Venona project, decrypted Soviet cables from the 1940s. Three hundred forty-nine Americans surfaced in the decryptions as Soviet intelligence contacts. Hiss was on the list. Cover name ALES.

This is the same press. The same instinct. The same century-long pattern of denying the warning until the evidence makes denial impossible.

Joe McCarthy was loud, populist, and often careless with specific names. But he was right about the main thing he was saying: the Soviet Union was recruiting Americans inside the United States government. The same thing is true of Communist China today. The same federal statutes exist to prosecute the people doing it. The work now is investigation and indictment.

Two halves of one project

Every Chinese espionage success costs the United States a specific American advantage. The former aide in Albany sold state-level access to American policy. The Navy sailor in San Diego sold ship systems to the country whose Navy now controls the Strait of Hormuz. The soldiers in Washington state sold long-range artillery information for the system Trump is now negotiating about in the Pacific. The Chinese intelligence recruiters were working on the next generation of inside access from inside the military. The mayor in California ran the propaganda layer that prepares the next aide and the next sailor. The cost is paid by the sailors deployed in the Pacific theater, by the American manufacturers whose patents walk out the door, and by the citizens whose representatives are quietly working someone else's policy.

The United States and the People's Republic of China have some shared interests and many that conflict. Like the Soviet Union before it, Communist China will eventually have to collapse. The spread of communism is an evil. Until Beijing falls, the work is containment. That means leverage abroad, which Trump built. And it means counterintelligence at home, which the FBI is doing, the United States Attorneys are filing, and the political class needs to back rather than bracket.

Both are necessary. Neither alone is enough.

What the trip should produce

A working relationship with Beijing that keeps Iran's nuclear program dead. A clear understanding that the United States is the senior partner at the table. And the recognition that the next American century is the live question. The Chinese century was the consensus of 2020, and it has fallen apart. Trump's job in Beijing is to lock in the next chapter. The job at home is to make sure Chinese intelligence does not steal what he wins abroad.

Trump landed in Beijing carrying real leverage. The work now is to use it.

Push China to the maximum on trade, technology, rare earths, and Iran. And keep Xi back from Taiwan. A Chinese war over the island pulls in the United States, Japan, South Korea, India, and Russia. That is how a third world war begins. The leverage Trump built is what keeps Beijing from triggering it.

This is a serious meeting. It has to deliver peace. And the counterintelligence work at home is what keeps that peace standing.