Trump’s team hopes his force of personality can break through with China’s leader, a feat that’s eluded past presidents

Reporting from Washington —  President Trump’s advisor and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has helped choreograph Chinese President Xi Jinping’s upcoming summit at Trump’s Florida resort, pressing the idea that the mercurial U.S. president can make a diplomatic breakthrough with the strait-laced Chinese leader based on personal rapport.

Most evidence and experience point to the contrary.

They include President Obama’s awkward attempt to forge a personal bond with Xi at the Sunnylands summit in Rancho Mirage in June 2013. Even Xi’s seemingly off-the-cuff comments to Obama as the two leaders strolled in shirtsleeves around a pond had been memorized and rehearsed, White House aides later determined.

Trump’s own impulses toward confrontation complicate the idea of bonding along the beachfront, as demonstrated by his March 30 tweet that he expected a “very difficult” meeting with Xi because of “massive trade deficits” with China.

Also complicating a potential charm offensive: Xi doesn’t play golf, Trump’s near-daily habit while at Mar-a-Lago.

For decades, the golf course has been Trump’s natural environment for bull sessions and developing ties for real estate and other business deals. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago in February, the two spent four hours on the links at Trump’s golf club nearby.

Trump and Xi will meet Thursday afternoon through Friday afternoon. The first day will include a dinner with the two first ladies, Melania Trump and Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, a famous Chinese soprano. The second day will feature working meetings, including a lunch.

“It’s possible that they’ll walk around a bit as the mood strikes. But nothing formal, or nothing involving golf clubs,” said a senior White House official who briefed reporters Tuesday on condition of anonymity.

Trump chose Mar-a-Lago when he invited Xi to visit the U.S., the official said, even though China’s paramount leader and his delegation will stay at another nearby hotel.

“It’s a place where [Trump] feels comfortable and at home, and where he can break the ice … without the formality of Washington,” the official said.

Recent history is not the way to judge the success of personal diplomacy, according to Michael Short, a spokesman for Trump. “It matters who’s in the room,” he said.

Trump is “a highly skilled negotiator and that’s something no one has seen” from a president, he said. “In some respects, nuts we haven’t been able to crack using the same old process — this president offers new opportunities using his background and renowned negotiating skills.”

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who visited Beijing last month, has been helping craft the game plan for Trump’s discussions with Xi, said another White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning.

Kushner, the official said, is “very skilled at developing personal relations” and is working on the “personal touch.” Kushner and Tillerson, the official added, are working “hand in glove.”

White House officials said the two governments have not prepared a scripted agenda, and don’t expect to resolve long-standing disputes. Instead the visit is meant to set a framework for future discussions.

During the presidential campaign last year, Trump repeatedly accused Beijing of manipulating its currency and stealing American jobs. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” Trump told a rally last May in Fort Wayne, Ind.

How Xi views that harsh rhetoric isn’t clear. This will mark his seventh visit to the United States — his first was in a corn industry delegation to Iowa in 1985 — so he may understand the vagaries of U.S. politics better than Trump understands China’s internal dialectics.

White House officials said they expect the discussions to revolve principally around Trump’s complaints about the trade imbalance and efforts to restrain North Korea’s advancing nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs before Pyongyang can threaten U.S. territory.

“It is now urgent because we feel the clock is very, very quickly running out,” said a White House official. Trump told the Financial Times in an interview published over the weekend that if China won’t act to restrain North Korea, the United States will.

U.S. officials believe China still has great leverage over Pyongyang since it controls most of the country’s trade. Beijing insists it has limited influence, however, and has proposed a deal in which the U.S. would stop military exercises with South Korea in exchange for a nuclear freeze, a proposal the White House has rejected.

Administration officials expect Xi to bring pledges for Chinese investments in American businesses that Trump can tout as evidence that he is beginning to reverse the decades-long trend of U.S. jobs being lost to lower-cost manufacturing in China.

They say Trump also is likely to ask China to make concessions to reduce the trade deficit — the gap between the value of goods China sells in the U.S. and the American products that China buys. In 2016, the U.S. had a $347-billion trade deficit with China, compared with a $69-billion deficit with Japan and a $65-billion deficit with Germany.

The White House also wants China to stop building airstrips and other military facilities on disputed shoals in the resource-rich South China Sea. U.S. warships and warplanes regularly patrol the area and have come dangerously close to clashes with Chinese forces several times.

That’s a lot to ask — and Trump doesn’t appear to have much to offer in return.

He has already given Xi a concession by agreeing to a visit so early in his administration, a nod to the critical importance of strong relations between the world’s two largest economies.

And since taking office, Trump has stopped calling into question the “one China” policy respecting China’s view of its own borders, a keystone of U.S. policy for more than four decades, and has ended his public overture to leaders in Taiwan, which Beijing considers a breakaway province.

Trump’s retreat on those two highly sensitive issues, at least for China, helped pave the way for Xi’s visit this week.

Trump got off to a “bad start” with China but can still recover, said R. Nicholas Burns, a former top diplomat in Republican and Democratic administrations. He said Trump erred when he seemed to be creating policy with China on the fly, like he would have done when negotiating to buy a new property.

“He took a tough position and then relinquished it immediately,” Burns said. “You don’t want to do that with the Chinese…. This is not a real estate deal, this relationship is very complex and multifaceted.”

Ely Ratner, a former senior advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, said hosting Xi now is “a big step in the wrong direction” if Trump wants to create a new trade deal with China.

The summit gives Xi “the ultimate foreign policy stamp of approval” before a critical Communist Party leadership meeting this fall, Ratner wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post. Trump could have held out the first meeting as an incentive for Xi to come to the table on unfair trade practices, he said.

Some U.S.-based experts on China are concerned that Trump will ignore China’s human rights record at home, including the persecution of Tibetans, Uighurs, religious groups, nongovernmental organizations, defense lawyers and democracy advocates.

They also worry that Trump’s inexperience in global diplomacy will play into China’s view of itself as an equal world power that should have a larger role in the western Pacific, a view that rattles longtime American allies Japan and South Korea.

“The Chinese want to create a new set of principles to hang around the neck of the new president,” said Dean Cheng, an expert on the Chinese military at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington.

At the Sunnylands summit in 2013, Obama’s team took pains to make it informal — the two leaders shed their suit jackets and ties in the oven-like heat of the Southern California desert.

But the casual atmosphere took more than two years of careful groundwork and internal discussion at the White House. Obama wanted Xi to agree to stricter air pollution limits, and to help push for passage of the international Paris agreement to limit global warming.

Xi agreed to significantly curb Chinese emissions over the long term, and ultimately played a key role in winning approval for the Paris accord.

The trip soured when Obama pressed Xi to stop China’s hacking of trade secrets and intellectual property from U.S. drug companies, financial institutions and other private businesses — a dispute that wasn’t solved until Xi returned for a state visit in 2015.

brian.bennett@latimes.com

Twitter: @ByBrianBennett

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