Bonny Lin

Xi is scheduled to attend a state dinner tonight, and there are more events planned for tomorrow.

Well, joining us now is Bonny Lin.

She served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from twenty fifteen to twenty eighteen as an advisor on China and Taiwan.

She's now director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

I do expect this to be raised, but I don't think it's anywhere near the top five or six most important issues for either side, and I don't see President Trump putting too much political capital on this, given the other big issues that he wants to get from the summit.

We will continue to pray for that situation then.

Bonny Lin is director of the China Power Project for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Bonnie, thank you so much.

Welcome to China Power.

I'm Bonny Lin, your host, and in this podcast, we dissect critical issues underpinning China as a global power.

Today I'm joined by Dimitri Sevastopoulos and Xiangwei Wang.

Dimitri is a U.S.-China correspondent at Financial Times, and Xiangwei is a senior visiting scholar at Harvard and former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post.

One of the main objectives China had, given that the meeting was in Beijing, was to really put Taiwan on the agenda and see if President Trump might have any shifts in Taiwan policy.

Bonnie Lin spent more than a decade at the Rand Corporation, a prestigious global policy think tank, as well as inside the Pentagon on the China and Taiwan desks.

Now she runs the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, another major think tank in Washington.

There was a lot of speculation before that summit that maybe there was a possibility that President Trump would say something on Taiwan that would be a change in U.S.-Taiwan policy.

So with Trump shifting U.S. thinking about Taiwan from a strategy that is ideologically motivated to one built more around transactionalism and with AI's increasing significance, isn't all-out conflict over the island more likely or less?

If we're talking about a military crisis or conflict, whether Taiwan's semiconductor industry survives is a huge question mark.

Bonnie Lin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

I think it's really important to go back to when President Xi Jinping in China first met President Trump.