When President Richard Nixon met Mao Zedong in 1972 the giant of Chinese Communism felt able to tell him: ‘I voted for you in the election.’ For good measure, Mao then informed his guest that ‘I like rightists.’ The two only met once and just for an hour but Nixon’s visit to China was such an extraordinary event that it was even made into an opera.

Since then meetings between American presidents and Chinese leaders have often been invested with more significance than they deserve. They became routine. But that can hardly be said of the next encounter between the 47^th president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, and Xi Jinping, the president of China, general secretary of the Communist Party and chairman of the Central Military Commission. The two once spoke of one another as ‘friends’ but Xi’s congratulatory message to Trump was devoid of personal warmth.

Mao himself never felt the need to occupy all the top offices, relying on his history and charisma to issue enigmatic guidance from the lakeside pavilion where his handshake with Nixon took place. To some analysts Xi’s fixation with being the ‘chairman of everything’ betokens acute insecurity, to others it just shows that he is an efficient dictator. In any case, he reigns supreme in China while his next American counterpart may gain complete control of Congress. Both men like to portray themselves as strong leaders.

Xi and Trump have not come face to face since the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the last year of Trump 45’s presidency. Trump called it the ‘Chinese virus’ and has since talked of extracting trillions of dollars in reparations.

The Chinese leader has spent the last four years Trump-proofing his economy to withstand heavy tariffs and to get around technology restrictions so that China can build what he calls ‘new productive forces’. That is what lies behind his energetic use of cyber-espionage and his push to get 21^st century products such as electric vehicles into global markets. He is set to collide with the second Trump administration across the spectrum of the world’s most important bilateral trading relationship.

Given that these are what Marxists would call great historical forces, how significant a role do personalities play? The evidence is little. For all Xi’s pomp and Trump’s bluster, both leaders are constrained by bureaucratic pressures and political limits. It was the same in 1972. The Nixon trip to China was historic because it brought two Cold War figureheads together. It was not a stroke of individual genius but resulted from a sequence of signals along the register of diplomatic communication that suggested the time was right.

We now know from foreign archives and dissident memoirs that the Chinese military and civilian leadership had collectively told Mao that it was time to mend fences with the West and to turn against the Soviet Union. Indeed, one declassified US document records that Xi Jinping’s mentor, the defence supremo Geng Biao, laid out a catalogue of Soviet crimes against socialist fraternity in a lunch conversation with Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Edmund Muskie, in 1980. At the time, the young Xi was one of his four private secretaries.

The Chinese side evidently felt it necessary to explain to their counterparts that the Kremlin had wanted to reduce their country to a permanently impoverished granary for the Soviet bloc without modern industry.

Vast historical forces indeed, and ones which Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have evoked in their speeches against the surge of Chinese competition which, they say, destroyed American jobs and businesses in the high and palmy days of globalisation.

In that sense, both Xi and Trump will go into the next round fortified by well-prepared briefs developed by their teams of advisors. Xi almost never extemporises and eyewitness accounts of Trump’s conversations with him point to more cunning and less idle talk than Trump is usually credited with. Both sides can draw on a mine of precedent.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, made a tour of the United States which yielded a publicity triumph. He attended a rodeo, donned a cowboy hat and made the cover of Time magazine in an era when that mattered. But on matters of substance – reciprocal access to nuclear weapons sites, for example – the two sides negotiated through panels of experts.

The Reagan presidency relegated China to secondary importance in its global contest against Soviet power. The People’s Republic went through its own painful cycle of rapid growth, inflation, discontent, unrest and violent repression while one Cold War domino after another tumbled. But it was a sideshow to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of European communism, although both remain etched on Xi Jinping’s consciousness.

It fell to President George Bush, a China hand though not a Sinologist, to manage the relationship after 1989. That became the theme of transpacific diplomacy: managing a dynamically profitable exchange which neither party wanted to put at risk. The lesson was absorbed by Xi during those years, which he spent in China’s booming coastal provinces.

Bill Clinton, too, was a manager. He bargained China into the World Trade Organisation, a goal so critical that both sides overlooked crises like the US missile strike against the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 (the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, is said to have admitted in a private memoir that he had given sanctuary in the building to Serbian military intelligence).

To the Chinese regime, the second Bush presidency represented continuity; Washington was, in any case, distracted by its wars against ‘terror’ and hostile Middle East powers. But the leadership severely underestimated Barack Obama. On his first visit as president, Obama endured a series of protocol slights and snubs, all calculated to reduce him to the status of subservient caller on the Chinese leaders of the time, President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.

Anyone tempted to nostalgia for a more collective and reasonable Chinese regime should study the episode. It backfired because Obama went home to start a ‘pivot to Asia’ which became a signature pushback policy designed to constrain China. It was Obama, not Trump, who was the progenitor of a hard line on China. He just didn’t say so.

By the time Xi Jinping reached the threshold of power, therefore, he had witnessed Chinese tactics towards six American presidents. He went on to deal with Donald Trump and Joe Biden, making it eight.

One worrying trait is that Xi does not seem to learn much from his top-level dealings. He inherited an institutional memory but was limited by his own comparative ignorance of Westerners in general and Americans in particular. His principal counsellor on American affairs, Wang Huning, is an opportunist who shrewdly converted himself from neo-authoritarian Shanghai professor to theoretical guru to three Chinese leaders. He feeds them ideas, they listen.

Wang was at Xi’s side when they went to Mar-a-Lago in April 2017 to call on Trump, ranked third in the delegation after the president and his wife. He believes Western democracy is in decline and doubtless sees the Trump renaissance as proof of his theory.

Diplomats now face the unenviable task of reading the intentions of two septuagenarian men whose policies may hinge on the advice of their inner circle. Competition for the leader’s ear is cacophonous in Washington. But in Beijing it is done in whispers.