On the face of it, US President Donald Trump’s China visit can be characterised by five Bs: beef, beans, Boeings, a board of investment and a board of trade. No wonder Trump rated his visit a “12 on a scale of one to 10”. Just the 200 Boeing aircraft China has agreed to buy is worth the presidential visit.

China has achieved no less. Compared with beef, beans and Boeings, the boards of investment and trade that both sides agreed to set up are perhaps more significant. With this institutional framework in place, bilateral economic and trade disputes can be brought under regular supervision and coordination. Reckless moves such as the United States arbitrarily imposing a 145 per cent tariff on Chinese goods should become far less likely.

China has acted as an impeccable host. President Xi Jinping taking Trump on a private tour of the gardens of Zhongnanhai – which serves as Xi’s official residence and the headquarters of China’s top leadership – is special treatment. Trump’s warm remarks about Xi and the Chinese people look to be more than a polite gesture.

Yet the real triumph for China is the visit itself – the first by a US president in nine years; Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden did not visit China at all during his term.

The best outcome from the Xi-Trump summit is their consensus to build “a constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability”. Evidently, stability can only be established between two parties of equal strength – for the first time, the US officially recognises China as a peer power.

Such recognition has not come easily. Since Trump first became president, relations have declined significantly, yet China has emerged much stronger. From 2017 to 2025, China’s export dependence on the US has dropped by 5.5 percentage points. In the tariff war launched by Washington, Beijing has wielded several lethal weapons including key industrial raw materials such as rare earths. The world saw that China was not the first to blink.

Still, there were no breakthroughs on two tough issues at the summit: Taiwan and Iran. On the Taiwan issue, Beijing’s top priority, Trump did not move from America’s policy of not supporting Taiwan’s independence towards explicitly opposing it, nor did he promise to cancel the multibillion-dollar arms sale to Taiwan, as Beijing had hoped.

Yet Washington will increasingly feel the pain. China now has far more tools to push back against America than protests: be it sanctions targeting major US defence contractors or larger and more frequent military drills around Taiwan.

It won’t be too long before Washington has to decide if such arms sales are still worth it. On Air Force One, avoiding a definitive answer on whether he would proceed with the arms sale, Trump said: “You know, we’re supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war. I’m not looking for that.”

As for Iran, it has asked China to help secure peace with the US. One week before Trump landed in Beijing, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi visited Beijing. Neither side can completely accept the conditions demanded by the other. The US wants Iran to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, halt its high-grade uranium enrichment and stop supporting regional armed groups. Iran insists the US must end all military strikes, remove all sanctions, unfreeze its overseas assets and pay war damages.

What can Beijing do? It did help, as Trump acknowledged. Yet it can further mediate, even behind closed doors, to focus on the top priority – a simultaneous announcement by Washington and Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. This is possible in that neither side can afford to let the situation drag on infinitely. Iran needs oil revenues to survive while Washington must fear the war’s further damage to oil prices, global markets and America’s image.

Beijing should also make it clear to Tehran that it should not charge fees on any ship transiting through the strait. This is a clear violation of international law, even if Iran exempted ships from countries it deemed friendly, such as China and Russia. No matter how Iran’s economy has been damaged by US military strikes, it should not charge the rest of the world fees.

Trump’s visit to China was no dramatic turning point. But it could be the start of a reset of Sino-US relations. Gone are the days when China-US relations had to rely on big purchases to smooth over differences. The future of the relationship is more likely to resemble jazz: unscripted and messy at times, even full of friction, yet somehow maintaining a rhythm.

本文系观察者网独家稿件，文章内容纯属作者个人观点，不代表平台观点，未经授权，不得转载，否则将追究法律责任。关注观察者网微信guanchacn，每日阅读趣味文章。