A great deal has been said about the summit between U.S. president Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping. But as far as I can tell, no media commentator has pointed out that Donald Trump’s speech at a May 13 state banquet just might have included subtle digs at his Chinese host.
The public usually doesn’t pay attention to the subtle art of “word exchanges” at summits like this. But it’s intriguing that Trump’s prepared remarks made no mention of the People’s Republic of China. Trump’s historical comments only cited acts of friendship between American and Chinese people during the Qing Dynasty and the first half of the 20th century.
There was no talk of former U.S. president Richard Nixon’s famous 1972 visit to China or former secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s advocacy for China’s ascendance on the world stage. Nor did Trump acknowledge former Chinese Communist leader Deng Xiaoping’s historic trip to the United States in 1979.
Instead, Trump highlighted other events, such as American diplomat Samuel Shaw’s arrival in China in 1784. The U.S. president also pointed out that one of America’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, published the sayings of Confucius in his colonial newspaper. Moreover, Trump added, a statue of the ancient Chinese philosopher stands outside the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C.
“The appreciation ran in both directions,” Trump declared. “Chinese admirers of George Washington gifted a stone tablet honouring his memory to adorn the Washington Monument. It bears the words of a Chinese official who called the great general in a statement ‘a hero among men’.”
The U.S. president also pointed out that Chinese workers helped lay railway tracks connecting the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific. He noted that American travellers helped spread literacy and brought modern medicine to China.
Donald Trump’s speech begins at 4:50 of this video.
Trump mentions Xi’s alma mater
One section of the speech, in particular, won’t go unnoticed by people living in Taiwan.
“At the request of China’s ambassador, it was President Theodore Roosevelt who provided the funds to establish President Xi’s alma mater, Tsinghua University,” Trump said.
It’s true that Roosevelt provided this funding for the university, which opened in 1911 in what was then called Peking. In 1928, its name was changed to National Tsing Hua University.
However, following the Chinese Civil War, many of its professors fled to Taiwan along with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces. National Tsing Hua University was re-established in 1956 in Hsinchu, Taiwan. The Taiwanese university is highly regarded, with three Nobel laureates as alumni.
The U.S. funding came from Boxer Indemnity payments made by the Qing Dynasty to several countries. The university in Taiwan retains that enormous fund and continues to use it today.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party turned Tsinghua University in Beijing into a polytechnic institute in the 1950s.
Wall Street Journal reporter Chun Han Wong wrote about Xi’s student days at Tsinghua’s Beijing campus in his 2023 book Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China’s Superpower Future.
“He pursued a degree in organic chemistry, but university education at that time was more political than academic, marred by a lack of intellectual rigor and patchy teaching,” Wong stated in his book. “One friend described Xi’s Tsinghua training as a degree ibn applied Marxism. Not that it mattered to Xi, who told another friend that he had no plans to work in the chemical industry.”
So, was Trump sending a coded message to Xi about the divergent histories of China and Taiwan by bringing up Tsinghua University? It wouldn’t be out of the question, given Trump’s refusal to acknowledge any connection between Xi’s Communist regime and the American people in his speech.
Trump also emphasized that former U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt often publicly praised the brave people of China when the two countries were allies in the Second World War. But again, FDR was speaking in an era when China was ruled by the Nationalists, not the Communists.
“Everybody loved what he had to say, just as many Chinese now love basketball and blue jeans,” Trump opined. “Chinese restaurants in America today now outnumber the five largest fast food chains in the United States all combined. That’s a pretty big statement.”
The Toronto Spark is on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
