There is no fundamental conflict between the United States and China, and the two great powers should start working together, the leader of a US congressional delegation said in Beijing on Tuesday.
Adam Smith, the most senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said the two sides needed to start engaging instead of talking past one another.
“You have to be willing to start the process of saying, okay, this is where I’m coming from. Where are you coming from? We’re not even at that point yet. We’re still talking past each other,” he said.
“We want to get to the place where China and the US are working together to make the world a better place. Yes, there will be competition, but it’s two great powers that really don’t have a fundamental intractable conflict. We ought to be able to work together on some of these problems in both of our countries’ interests, but also in the interests of the world.”
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This is the first congressional delegation to visit China since 2019 and since they arrived in Beijing on Sunday, they have met premier Li Qiang, vice-premier He Lifeng, and defence minister Dong Jun.
[ Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping to meet in South Korea next monthOpens in new window ]
Other members of the delegation included Michael Baumgartner, a Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as well as Ro Khanna and Chrissy Houlahan, both Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee.
The congressmen’s visit follows a phone call last Friday during which Trump and Xi agreed to meet at an APEC summit in South Korea at the end of October. Trump said he would visit China in the early part of 2026, adding that Xi would travel to the US later next year.
Trump said after the call that he and Xi had reached a deal on the future of TikTok in the US, although the Chinese readout was more circumspect on the issue. US officials offered more details on Monday, saying they did not expect to have any further negotiations on the agreement and that all that remained to be done was to finalise the paperwork.
The White House said the deal would move TikTok’s US operations into a joint venture with a majority of American investors and directors. Oracle, which is owned by Trump ally Larry Ellison, would be responsible for overseeing the security of the app and ensuring that it was “behaving appropriately”.
Chinese law forbids TikTok’s owner ByteDance to sell the app’s algorithm so the deal would see the new joint venture leasing it. Oracle would then retrain the algorithm “from the ground up” according to US officials.
Smith said in Beijing that his understanding was that the TikTok deal was not “100 per cent resolved” and he said Congress still had concerns about privacy and security. The app was due to be banned in the US on January 19th but Trump has repeatedly postponed its implementation, most recently until mid-December.
With most of the congressional delegation made up of members of the House Armed Services Committee, much of their focus was on defence issues. Smith said that the military-to-military relationship was of particular concern.
“China is the most rapidly growing military and the most rapidly growing nuclear power in the world,” he said. “The US has the biggest military in the world and the biggest nuclear arsenal. It is dangerous for us not to be having regular communications about our capabilities and intentions, so we understand each other and so that miscalculations and misunderstandings don’t lead to larger problems.
“I think their perspective is the same perspective that most countries have, which is they want their military to be strong enough to defend their interests, which is logical and makes perfect sense. I think we want to get to the point where China understands now they are such a large military they need to have more conversations with the other large militaries in the world for basic deconfliction.”
This month’s military parade on Tiananmen Square showcased some of China’s most advanced weapons systems and demonstrated for the first time that the country can launch nuclear missiles from land, sea and air. Smith said the rapid expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal meant that, although Beijing still has far fewer warheads than the US and Russia, it was time to start the kind of dialogue that Moscow and Washington maintained throughout the cold war.
“There’s such a rapid change in technology in terms of AI and drone warfare and cyber and space. It’s moving so rapidly and happening so quickly, the risk of a misunderstanding of capabilities on one side or the other is great. I think there needs to be communication about that,” he said.
The US ambassador to China, David Perdue, said the relationship between Trump and Xi was “very good and very encouraging”. And he commended the congressional delegation for taking a risk by coming to China.
“This is not an easy thing for them to do. They will take some political hits potentially back home. But I can tell you from our conversations, they’re not soft on China. They’re not hard on China. They want peace and stability, which is what China has asked for and what we’re asking for,” he said.
