President Donald Trump on May 14 publicly agreed with Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s suggestion that the United States had become a “declining nation,” and made clear that Xi was describing the country Joe Biden left behind, not the one Trump now leads.

“He was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100 percent correct,” Trump wrote on Truth Social from Beijing, where the two leaders were holding a two-day summit.

Trump’s reading tracks closely with how the Chinese leader has framed global affairs throughout the Biden era. At a January 2021 Central Party School study session for senior cadres, Xi reportedly told them that “the East is rising and the West is declining.”

He repeated variations of the line through Biden’s four years in office, including in a 2023 speech to new Central Committee members, in which he noted “the stark contrast between the rise of the East and decline of the West.”

Xi struck the same theme in his May 14 opening remarks to Trump at the Great Hall of the People. According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s official readout, he said, “transformation not seen in a century is accelerating across the globe” and asked whether Beijing and Washington could “overcome the Thucydides Trap.”

The Thucydides Trap, popularized by Harvard Kennedy School Professor Graham Allison in his 2017 book “Destined for War,” refers to the danger of conflict when a rising power challenges an established one. Allison’s research found that 12 of 16 such historical rivalries ended in war.

The narrative of American decline took hold in Beijing during a stretch when U.S. illegal border crossings hit record highs—more than 2.4 million encounters at the southwest border in fiscal year 2023, according to Customs and Border Protection—inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, the highest in four decades, and the chaotic August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan left 13 U.S. service members dead. A Chinese surveillance balloon also crossed the continental United States in February 2023 before being shot down off the South Carolina coast.

Trump, in his Truth Social post, pointed to a sharp reversal under his second term. He cited record stock markets, trillions of dollars in announced foreign investment, and the rollback of “open borders, high taxes, transgender for everybody, men in women’s sports, DEI, horrible trade deals,” and “rampant crime.”

“Two years ago, we were, in fact, a Nation in decline. On that, I fully agree with President Xi!” he wrote. “But now, the United States is the hottest Nation anywhere in the world.”

A Chinese Embassy spokesperson did not push back on Trump’s interpretation, telling Fox News Digital that “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can go hand in hand,” and that the two presidents had agreed to build “a constructive China–U.S. relationship of strategic stability.”

The meeting was not without sharp edges.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s readout said Xi told Trump that Taiwan is “the most important issue in China–U.S. relations” and warned that if the matter is “handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy.”

The White House summary made no mention of Taiwan.

The visit was Trump’s first to China since 2017, and the first by any sitting U.S. president in nearly a decade. Xi and Biden met twice during Biden’s term—in Bali in November 2022 and in Woodside, California, in November 2023—as the two governments tried to stabilize ties strained by disputes over Taiwan, fentanyl, and the balloon incident.