With China's leader Xi Jinping wrapping his three-day visit with President Donald Trump in the U.S. on Friday, the question is what was achieved and what did each side want to get out of the bilateral summit?

To answer the former, the answer is not much, beyond extending the U.S.-China trade truce-previously scheduled to expire Nov. 10-by two months to January 2027. What each side wanted is a more complex question-and one I put to Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia, a fluent Mandarin speaker who has spent decades working in China.

Rudd, the former ambassador to the U.S. and current CEO of the educational nonprofit Asia Society, spoke with me in a Thursday interview at Journal House on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

His comments have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Barron's: What did the Chinese want from this meeting?

Kevin Rudd: Number one, they want a summit without any political or protocol glitch. Why? Because this is all about China and its domestic media. If you follow it as closely, Xi Jinping being treated as a coequal as the president of the U.S. and therefore sending the symbolism to the Chinese audience back home and around the world that China is now on the same level as America. That's the deep narrative in the Chinese propaganda stakes. And that's not to be underestimated.

There must be some more substantive things, no?

From the Chinese lens, I would say: tariffs, tariffs, and tariffs. Because if you look carefully at the Chinese economic model at the moment, much of it is not working. China's private domestic consumption is flat. China's private fixed capital investment growth is flat. China's private residential construction is now into its sixth year of recession. The only pistons working in this engine at the moment are one, state investment or state driven investment in its techno-industrial sector.

Secondly, on top of that net exports which is a big driver. China is earning $1.2 to $1.3 trillion from the rest of the world. What China can least afford, therefore, going into the summit in Washington, is for there to be a snapback in tariffs or a tariff increase on those pre-existing arrangements, which U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer is perfectly empowered to do. The Chinese want that to be controlled and contained.

The U.S. believed it had an agreement with the Chinese and Xi Jinping in Busan last year to normalize trade in critical minerals and rare earths. China has moved to normalize that, except for two countries in the world: the U.S. and Japan. The Chinese are deliberately using this as leverage. What leverage are they trying to apply? They want to get the Americans to further reduce export controls on critical technology exports to China, most particularly advanced semiconductors.

What does the U.S. want?

For the Chinese to honor the Busan Agreement and fully normalize critical minerals and rare earths, and if they don't, then the real risk from the Chinese lens is that America, through a whole bunch of other partners in the world, including Australia, will simply move to plug this gap over the course of the next two to three years, and China's leverage then disappears. So, President Donald Trump wants this one fixed, plus a huge addition to China's currently constrained agricultural imports from the United States. Given, of course, the pain that's inflicted.

Extending the life of the current tariff pause by two months is basically sending a signal to Beijing, 'We expect this to be fixed by Christmas. If not, be on notice that we can go to a tariff increase, maybe even leverage the Europeans to increase tariffs.'

So you're saying that they want, say Nvidia chips, and we want their critical minerals?

The president's lens on this is, 'Hey we'll keep tariffs lower than they would otherwise be, but you need to honor your side of the bargain, which is to fully normalize critical minerals and rare earths exports, or alternatively, we'll bring tariffs right back up and maybe increase them further.'

More broadly, what does China want over time, and exactly how weak or strong is the economy? I go to China and things look okay to me.

On the surface, most things do look okay in China, but look at rising youth unemployment. That is a massive problem in terms of the Chinese demographic, and then social stability and therefore ultimately political stability, and that's before Chinese manufacturing and the total economy has fully absorbed and diffused artificial intelligence. Because as we know, one of the productivity yields of AI is labor force reduction in labor-intensive industries. This is the global center of robotics. What happens to all those folks who have been working on assembly lines across China for the last 20 or 30 years? Below the surface the Chinese have a bunch of economic problems.

How strong are they? What Xi Jinping has sought to build is a strong China. He says that Mao Zedong caused China to stand up, Deng Xiaoping caused China to become rich or richer. Under Xi Jinping, we're making China strong, and that goes back to the narrative about coequal strength with the U.S. militarily, beyond the drivers of the economy, including technology. Militarily the Chinese are doing well. They now have the largest surface fleet in the world.

Bigger than the U. S.?

Last count earlier this year was something in the order of 370 to 390 surface combatants in the PLA Navy against 270 to 290 here in the United States. The U.S. submarine force is slightly ahead and certainly further ahead in terms of the qualitative superiority of U.S. submarines, including nuclear-powered attack-class submarines.

Are there different measures of Chinese national power?

The Chinese internal calculus is called comprehensive national power, and they factor in the economy, technology, the military, and other associated assets. If you look carefully at their public commentary year by year under Xi Jinping, they're saying this is getting better and better. So their strategic calculus is that they will emerge more powerful than America.

I think there's a problem with that analysis because it underestimates the ability for America to reinvent itself, for which Silicon Valley is a classic example about how you constantly make things new in this country. So I think the Chinese may be having a fit of premature hubris, and that's dangerous because it can give rise to excessive political self-confidence.

So is that the endgame, Kevin? Or would that be manifested in eventually taking Taiwan in some way, shape, or form?

If you ask me to summarize what the Chinese worldview is, it is that strength is for a purpose. It's not an endpoint in itself. But remember, the underlying political culture of the People's Republic of China is that it's a Marxist-Leninist state, where power proceeds from the barrel of a gun, as Mao Zedong said. Lenin was not a liberal democrat. Stalin was not a liberal democrat. Mao was not a liberal democrat, nor is Xi Jinping a liberal democrat. It's an axiom which proceeds from the power of the state, the power of the military, the power of the security apparatus.

So what's the endpoint? Grounded in that power, China's core objective is to, as they would say, reunify the country. Taiwan has been absent from the Chinese political union since 1949. Xi Jinping would dearly love to complete the reunification project. If you look at China's military preparedness for this, together with their other territorial claims, maritime territorial claims primarily in East Asia, against Japan, against the Philippines, against Vietnam, and against Korea, that's where China wants to land. Second, to then become the dominant military and economic power in the East Asian Hemisphere, so that they are the power principle of the wider region.

And then, globally, you look carefully at Xi Jinping's plans for the reform of global governance, and he has these four grand initiatives: the Global Civilization Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Development Initiative and the Global Governance Initiative, as well as the Belt and Road Initiative, this is all designed toward creating a new architecture where the U.S. is no longer its center, but China is.

I was going to ask about that. In other words, 'Okay, China, that's your view of the world. Where does the U.S. fit in?' Do they want a bipolar world, for instance, or do they want to just get rid of us completely.

As I look at the operational characteristics of Chinese strategy on the ground in the Indo-Pacific, it's to push the U.S. back to the Central Pacific, because they would see East Asia and the Western Pacific as their natural hemisphere, their natural sphere of influence. Think of the historical evolution of the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere, and the Chinese have been active students of the Monroe Doctrine and its evolution over time. That is the play.

Secondly, in the declaratory policy of Xi Jinping, and I looked at his language on arrival at Joint Base Andrews, where he said, 'Make America great again,' and the great renaissance of the Chinese people-which is his signature call to China since he became president, which is China returning to the power it had in the world prior to the Opium Wars-these are not incompatible. There's no contradiction between them. That's his declaratory position.

I'm less confident of that being the operational reality, because if you go to the meat and potatoes of the AI competition at the moment, President Donald Trump says in black and white, 'He who wins AI, wins.' He sees this as a fairly binary competition with the U.S. in terms of this future driver of both economic and military power. Xi Jinping's narrative internally is much the same.

So therefore, we can all play happy families on the outside, but let's not forget that underneath, as seen from the lens of both capitals, this is a strategic competition ultimately about one thing: which country emerges as the fulcrum of the economic and political and geostrategic order in the Indo-Pacific, and then secondly, over time, globally. That actually is what the strategic competition is about, and that's how I read their internal literature.

What about Xi Jinping's tenure? There's people whispering that maybe has some health issues. How long is he going to stay in the seat, and how would a transfer of power even take place at this point?

Well, firstly, the best I can pick up in terms of [health] rumors is that they are ill-founded and that he remains in robust health. I don't think there's a fundamental problem with Xi Jinping's physical constitution. Secondly, if he has his way, and at present he gets his way on everything domestically, he will not only be reappointed for a record fourth term as China's General Secretary of the Communist Party in October 2027, and that will take him out to 2032, at which point he'll be 78 years old, going on 79. I think in his mind he has it open as to whether he remains beyond that as well, into a fifth and even sixth term, into his mid to late 80s. [...] For China's paramount leaders, this is not unprecedented. So we need to wrap our heads around the fact that Xi Jinping is not constrained by term limits. Leader for life is more likely to be it. So on the succession question, if anyone bobbed their head up now saying 'I'm the successor,' I doubt that that head would be in place the following morning.

Xi Jinping has demonstrated himself to be a formidable domestic political operator. He changed the constitution, and those [two-term] constitutional limits are now gone. And if you look at the pace and rate at which he purges people, both Politburo members and senior members of the military, this guy does not have a big sense of humor when it comes to anyone who looks like they could be a political opponent of any form. This is a formidable domestic operator within a Leninist system.

Sounds like JD Vance or Andy Beshear or AOC or whomever is going to be the next president is going to have to get used to engaging with him. Thanks, Kevin.