What China saw in Geneva

Trump claimed a reset. Beijing recognized the bluff.

By Brian O’Neill

In the 1986 black comedy “Ruthless People,” Danny DeVito plays a man whose wife is kidnapped by a pair of amateur criminals demanding ransom. Instead of paying, he celebrates—because he wanted her gone in the first place. The kidnappers try to escalate. They drop the price. They threaten violence. DeVito dares them to go through with it. The plot unfolds as a dark satire of mismatched incentives and strategic bluffing—where every side miscalculates, and no one’s playing the same game.

Nearly 40 years later, we might be watching a sequel—this time set in Geneva, with tariff rates as the hostages, the bluff geopolitical, and the kidnapper declaring victory for backing down.

On Monday, after two days of negotiations in Geneva, the United States and China announced a temporary reduction in the punishing tariffs they had imposed on each other. The White House called it a “reset.” Markets welcomed a reprieve.

Beijing welcomed it, too. A prolonged trade war risked worsening already sluggish domestic consumption, tariff-related unemployment, and deflationary pressure at home. Easing tensions was in China’s interest.

But to Beijing, Geneva wasn’t a breakthrough. It was confirmation that its strategy is sound—that come what may, it has positioned itself to absorb short-term volatility without altering course.

A 90-day rollback of tariffs—without enforcement mechanisms, allied alignment, or policy coherence—signaled precisely what China has come to expect: U.S. President Donald Trump’s pressure arrives loudly, retreats impulsively, and leaves no lasting architecture in its wake. This is not what adversaries fear. It’s what they plan around.

Since Trump’s first term, Beijing has framed U.S. tariffs as justification to accelerate a shift already underway—redrawing its trade map and deepening ties across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The Belt and Road Initiative, once questioned as overreach, has matured into a global logistics backbone. Today, more than 145 countries do more trade with China than with the United States, according to the Lowy Institute’s data. In 2001, it was just 30.

In the weeks leading up to the Geneva meeting, U.S. media focused heavily on press conferences and rhetorical spin, but China maintained a more measured posture. It was reinforcement. China’s President Xi Jinping made Southeast Asia his first diplomatic stop after the latest tariff escalation, visiting Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Roughly a quarter of Chinese exports are now manufactured in or routed through secondary countries like these—some to bypass tariffs, others to solidify regional integration.

This week, Xi is hosting Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and other Latin American leaders in Beijing for a summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States—an organization that notably excludes the United States and Canada. Trade, infrastructure, and commodity deals will be announced. But the symbolism is the point: The Western Hemisphere is no longer assumed to be Washington’s domain.

China isn’t pretending to be innocent. It’s positioning itself as inevitable. Beijing has imposed its own punitive tariffs in the past—Australia knows this well—but the cumulative effect of Trump’s approach has been to make China look like the more stable trade partner. Even U.S. allies are hedging. Some want to avoid choosing between the two giants. Others no longer believe they must.

And in Beijing, the view is simple: This crisis has shown that the United States might escalate faster, but it also folds sooner, guided less by strategy than by self-preservation. China sees a U.S. president surrounded by loyalists pursuing cryptocurrency speculation, opaque aircraft deals, and Gulf state side arrangements that serve his personal finances more than national interests.

The exception—perhaps the only one—is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. His presence in Geneva signaled institutional memory and risk management. His absence would have been read as political surrender. Beijing likely views him not as a policymaker to fear but as the final adult at the table. And it is watching to see how long he lasts.

If Washington’s approach to strategic competition is improvisational, Beijing’s is architectural. Every trade reprieve, every summit, every lull in confrontation is mapped against larger efforts to reshape the geopolitical terrain. And China is moving.

For Beijing, Geneva was less a negotiation than a milestone in a longer timeline—proof that American pressure lacks staying power, that global institutions are already hedging, and that the world’s trust in U.S. leadership is increasingly conditional. The tariff rollback, framed by Beijing as a U.S. climbdown without concessions, will likely be remembered not for its technical details but for reinforcing that China now enters negotiations from a position of psychological advantage.

None of this means China is poised to replace the United States. It doesn’t have to. Beijing is building an alternative order—not to eclipse the West outright but to offer enough parallel capacity that U.S. influence becomes optional.

The Geneva talks only bought time; they didn’t reset anything. The bifurcation continues—just more quietly and with fewer illusions. In Beijing, the shift is no longer theoretical. Trade routes have moved. Supply chains have adapted. The belief that Washington will return to predictability has been shelved.

“It’s hard to wake someone who’s pretending to sleep,” one export advisor told the BBC. “But it’s even harder to put someone to sleep who has just awakened.”

The point wasn’t subtle—China has made its adjustments, and it won’t be coaxed back to sleep.

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech.

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