Indeed, while Trump crowed about the pomp lavished on him—“We certainly got a very nice greeting and today was beautiful,” he told Fox News—China also wins by the sheer number of longstanding bugbears that were given a pass. It’s no secret that Trump has zero interest in religious rights, media freedoms, labor rights, the crackdown on Tibetans and Uyghur Muslims, eroding freedoms in semiautonomous Hong Kong, or even, it appears, military assistance to Russia or support for North Korea these days. Though there was also no sense that he tried to hold Beijing’s feet to the fire on strategic matters such as cyber espionage, IP theft, state subsidies, and an undervalued renminbi, or the export of fentanyl precursors.
