As crunch talks were underway between the United States and China in Donald Trump’s first term, Xi Jinping’s negotiating team used every trick in the book to unsettle the American side.
Shortly before a key meeting took place, as the U.S. team was about to set out from their embassy in Beijing, the Chinese delivered a follow-up to a carefully prepared negotiating document for the talks. It was in Chinese, without an English translation.
Then, when Trump’s negotiating team got to the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse for the meeting, they discovered there were one too few chairs for them. One of the U.S. negotiators had to leave the room.
‘We’re sitting in a secure facility, a team of tens of people that have come over from the U.S., and we looked at the document they provided. It was in Chinese, it was not at all responsive to the draft we sent before travelling to Beijing,’ Mitchell Silk, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, told the Daily Mail.
Silk shared his insights on Trump’s diplomatic tactics ahead of the president’s historic showdown with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday.
‘They completely disregarded our document. They delivered up something that they wanted to use for the negotiations,’ Silk said of the Chinese ahead of the 2019 summit with Trump.
In his upcoming book ‘A Seat at the Table,’ Silk, who speaks two dialects of Chinese, recounts how he quickly translated the document in the car en route to the talks with Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin.
When they got there Mnuchin made it clear the Americans weren’t meeting for the sake of it.
‘He was just very short and very simple, he was perfectly gracious in, thanking the Vice Premier for his kind and warm welcome. He acknowledged receipt of the document, and he just took our document, waved it around, and said, thank you but I think we’re going to be using our document for these discussions, and that’s exactly what we did,’ said Silk.
‘There was no funny business. There were no games. We were there to do business, and we weren’t having any of it.’
He added :’If it had been another administration, another time, and this is probably what was happening in these endless, meaningless meetings prior to Trump, somebody would have said, well, you know, maybe we should we use their document? There was none of that. Psychologically, we weren’t having it, and we made that very clear.’
During the talks, which led to Trump’s first trade deal with China in 2020, every little detail of protocol had been worked out over preceding weeks, including who was going to sit where.
But when everybody sat down, right before the then Chinese Vice Premier Liu He spoke, it was clear that there was one chair missing.
Someone on the American side had to leave the room, and one of the dedicated career civil servants took the fall.
Later, outside of the main room, Silk engaged with the head of protocol from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It emerged that the Chinese felt snubbed because the Vice Premier had not been granted an Oval Office audience when he was in Washington just weeks prior.
‘Our understanding was the chair was their way of getting back at us, rather petty,’ said Silk.
Ultimately, the head of the Chinese central bank, Yi Gang, was walking by and Silk told him: ‘Mr. Governor, when you are next in Washington, please join me at my house for a dinner. I will put out a lavish spread for you with the finest of drink and the finest of food, and you can have as many chairs as you like.’
The American team got their chair back.
It was yet another example of the psychological games that Trump will face in his upcoming tariff negotiations with the Chinese.
This week, President Trump extended a trade truce with China for another 90 days, delaying a dangerous showdown between the world’s two biggest economies.
The previous deadline was set to expire at 12:01am on Tuesday.
Had that happened the U.S. could have ratcheted up taxes on Chinese imports from an already high 30 percent, and Beijing could have responded by raising retaliatory levies on U.S. exports to China.
The pause buys time for the two countries to work out some of their differences, perhaps clearing the way for a summit later this year between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, and it has been welcomed by the U.S. companies doing business with China.
Silk said the key to reaching an agreement was to ‘stay the course with maximum pressure.’
Since the inauguration Trump had shown himself to be a ‘master at three dimensional chess.’
Key has been the use of executive power to deploy tariffs as leverage.
‘He’s come out swinging, using tariffs imposed under executive order, so presidential authority, as an economic weapon, and he started that literally in the first days of the administration,’ said Silk.
‘The heavy and the quick action certainly rattled the markets, but I believe that the president was playing for long-term economic leverage.’
The tariffs have been ‘much sharper, they’re more targeted, and they’re higher than before.’
Behind that was a strategy to ‘clear the decks’ of other trading partners, securing quick deals with them, so that he could focus on China.
‘My take is that the initial move was designed to get initial action out of a certain set of countries (including the UK, EU, Japan and South Korea), and push a second group of countries further down the road, try to pick them off one by one.’
He added: ‘And then you’ve got the most difficult countries, and the number one, without a close second in that group, is China.’
Realistically, the China negotiation is probably a 12-to-18 month process, he said.
Key will be dealings between Trump and Xi.
‘It’s critical, and it’s important, but in my view, it’s a question of timing,’ said Silk. ‘One cannot expect there to be daily phone calls.’
But at critical pressure points, perhaps every every other month, it is ‘critically important that the two of them are on the line.’
He said: ‘Probably that will happen relatively infrequently, but enough that that the president will have a channel to be able to clear a final issue or a final hurdle or two.’