中文
By Josef Gregory Mahoney
Lead: The Washington summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump paired warm ceremony with concrete results.
At the White House last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced what he called a piece of good news. Two giant pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, would travel from Chengdu to Zoo Atlanta as "envoys of friendship." U.S. President Donald Trump had met his guest on the tarmac, a courtesy rarely extended to a visiting head of state, and the two days that followed combined ceremonial warmth with practical results.
The summit is best judged not only by what was signed but by the direction it set. President Xi has said on many occasions that China and the United States should be partners, not rivals, and that achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can go hand in hand, to the benefit of both and of the world. In May, the two presidents agreed to build a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability. In Washington, they added that it would rest on respect, fairness and reciprocity. The meeting was a step in giving that description practical form.
The Chinese intellectual tradition offers an unusually rich vocabulary for understanding that direction.
The Xici commentary on the "Book of Changes" puts it with a brevity later systems have rarely improved upon: One yin and one yang — that is what is called the Dao. Yin and yang are not two camps facing each other across a line. They are complementary forces that generate and transform into one another, as night passes into day and each season prepares the next. Each contains the seed of the other. The Dao is not the victory of either but the ongoing process of their interplay. Difference, in this view, is not a problem to be eliminated. It is the source of movement and renewal. The question, in politics as in cosmology, is whether difference is allowed to become a source of mutual generation, or is frozen into fixed opposition.
Zhang Zai, the Northern Song philosopher, gave this idea its most exact classical sentence. In the Taihe chapter of the "Zhengmeng," he set out a chain of reasoning: where there are phenomena there are counterparts; counterparts move in opposite directions; opposition gives rise to tension; and tension must be resolved in harmony.
Two points help a modern reader. The word rendered as tension is not hatred in the ordinary sense but the friction between counterparts. And the harmony that resolves it is not uniformity. It is what Confucius described as harmony without sameness, in which difference is kept and made productive. Zhang Zai was no sentimentalist. He accepted that friction is real. He denied only that it must be pursued to the end.
This older philosophical vocabulary also finds a modern political echo. Chinese Marxism offers a related insight, though the connection is suggestive rather than doctrinal. In "On Contradiction" (1937), and more fully in "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People" (1957), Mao Zedong distinguished antagonistic contradictions from non-antagonistic ones. He developed the distinction for China's domestic governance, not for foreign affairs. But its core lesson travels well: the method must fit the type. Contradictions among parties who share a common future are mishandled the moment they are treated as a struggle between enemies. Treat an adjustable difference as irreconcilable, and you risk creating the very hostility you feared. China's foreign policy rests on its own longstanding principles, from the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence to today's emphasis on mutual respect and win-win cooperation. Read alongside them, Mao's distinction and Zhang Zai's sentence help explain the patience with which China approaches its most important bilateral relationship.
President Xi has described the present as a time of changes unseen in a century — a rearrangement of economic weight, technology and political authority faster than the transitions Western elites still treat as the template. Mao's China lived in an age of blocs and blockades. Today China and the United States are each other's markets, suppliers and indispensable counterparts on problems neither can solve alone. Building stability under those conditions is patient, unglamorous work, and it cannot be done by one side.
During this summit, both sides did it. Tariffs, technology, Taiwan and conflicts beyond both countries' shores were all on the table.
On Taiwan, Beijing restated its expectation and urged Washington to adhere to the correct position of opposing "Taiwan independence" and handle the question with prudence. Neither side pretended the issue was simple, but both kept it from overshadowing everything else.
The results were concrete. The trade truce was extended to Jan. 10, with further understandings on agriculture, medical devices and consumer goods to follow. The two leaders also agreed to support each other as China will host the 2026 APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting in November and the United States will host the G20 Leaders' Summit in December, expressing intention that they will attend each other's event. Xi noted that both countries would lose in a conflict and called for regular military dialogue. Ceremony is not substance. It is also not nothing. After a decade in which, on both sides of the Pacific, distrust was too often taken as proof of clear thinking, the decision to keep talking in public, and to give that talking a place on the diplomatic calendar, is itself a substantive choice, and it was made jointly.
The most forward-looking result drew fewer headlines. The two presidents agreed to continue a dialogue on artificial intelligence. Their emphases may differ: Xi spoke of development for good and under human control, Trump of the race toward what he calls "super intelligence." But AI is the field where competition could most easily outrun understanding. Opening a channel early, before problems arise, is exactly the kind of foresight that turns a potential source of friction into a shared responsibility.
The warmest evidence came on four legs. Atlanta has been without pandas since its previous animals returned to China in late 2024. The new arrangement is a long-term conservation partnership, and panda diplomacy is a proven instrument: Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China is still remembered in America partly because children could see what diplomats could not yet say. Two great nations with much to discuss can still agree that a bear in a bamboo grove is better politics than another speech about decoupling. A city that takes its children to see Ping Ping and Fu Shuang is a city in which China is a friend with a face, not an abstraction. The welcome Atlanta gives them will say something to Chinese audiences about America, too.
Call it pandas-to-people if the usual phrase has grown tired. People-to-people is the larger half of the same endeavor. Xi invited 100,000 young Americans to study and exchange in China over the next five years, twice the number pledged in San Francisco in 2023. Doubling the offer is a statement of confidence. Chinese universities, among the fastest-rising in the world, are ready to receive them. The offer will go furthest if Washington encourages young Americans to accept it, and extends the same welcome to Chinese students in the United States. Youth exchanges are slow and difficult to fake. A young American who has lived in Chengdu, or a young Chinese person who has lived in Chicago, becomes a poor audience for the claim that the other society is only a threat. Pandas get the headline. The 100,000 are the policy.
None of this asks either country to become the other. China and the United States have different histories, systems and interests, and those interests will not always coincide. Zhang Zai's sentence is demanding precisely because it does not ask anyone to pretend otherwise. The "Book of Changes" offers a striking image for this dynamic. In the Tai hexagram, meaning "peace" or "prosperity," earth appears above heaven. This is not a mistake of order: heaven's energy rises, earth's descends, and the two meet. As the Tuan commentary on the hexagram explains, when heaven and earth commune, all things flourish. In the neighboring Pi hexagram, meaning "stagnation," heaven and earth remain in their expected places, yet precisely because they do not interact, nothing passes between them. The lesson is not that difference should be erased, but that difference becomes fruitful only when each side moves toward the other. Prosperity arises from exchange, not from separation.
A truce will be renewed or replaced. Pandas will eat and sleep and draw crowds. Students will come back with better Chinese and better questions.
The test of the Washington meeting is not whether it wrote a new order but whether, amid changes unseen in a century, the relationship is being steered toward stability, respect and mutual benefit. By that test, the summit succeeded. Beijing brought a patient philosophy and generous invitations. Washington brought a warm welcome and agreed to the calendar. "Tension must be resolved in harmony" is not a soft ending. It is the harder discipline, and last week it was practiced on both sides of the table.
Josef Gregory Mahoney is a professor of politics and international relations and director of the Center for Ecological Civilization at East China Normal University in Shanghai. He is also a senior research fellow with the Institute for the Development of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics at Southeast University in Nanjing.
