Following the recent Trump-Xi Summit, many questions have been raised about the future of diplomatic relations between the US and the PRC, particularly around Taiwan. From the contentious pending arms sale to the proposed boards of trade and investment to Taiwan’s opposition leader Cheng Li-wun’s trip to Beijing and Washington, D.C., security and trade in the Western Pacific are facing new challenges. June 4 also marked the 37th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. To unpack that historic moment and the aftermath of the summit, the Monitor spoke with Jonathan D. Fritz.
Jonathan D. Fritz served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian & Pacific Affairs until February 13, 2026. Previously, he served as the Chief of Staff to the Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy & the Environment, and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian & Pacific Affairs, responsible for China, Mongolia, and Taiwan. Before that, he was the director for bilateral & regional affairs in the State Department’s Office of International Communications & Information Policy. Prior to that, he was posted at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, where he served alternately as minister-counselor for economic affairs, chief of staff, acting deputy chief of mission, and chargé d’affaires. From 2010 to 2014, Jonathan headed the economic sections of our embassies in Canberra and Kabul. Before that, he worked on trade, investment, and IPR issues at our posts in Beijing, Mexico City, and Hong Kong. Jonathan also served in Washington on the staff of the deputy secretary of state, as a trade negotiator in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and as a desk officer in the State Department’s Office of Chinese & Mongolian Affairs. Jonathan began his Foreign Service career with consular tours in China and Ecuador. He spent two years at the U.S. Air Force Academy before transferring to Stanford University, where he graduated with a B.A. and an M.A. in East Asian studies.
Emma Brignall: You first entered China’s political scene somewhat unintentionally when you arrived in Beijing as a college student, and Tiananmen Square unfolded in its 1989 massacre. Can you talk a bit about what that day was like? Did this moment shape how you viewed US-China relations and your decision to join the foreign service?
Jonathan Fritz: I had started taking Chinese as a cadet at the Air Force Academy, which was where I first did my first two college years. I had taken Latin in high school, and you had to take a modern language at the Air Force Academy. I wanted to take something that no one had been likely to take in high school so I could get a reasonable chance of getting a good grade. I think I flipped a coin between Arabic and Chinese, and it was tails, and so I took Chinese for two years at the Air Force Academy, and I was getting very interested in the language and history. I got so into it that I decided to take a year off from the Air Force Academy, go to Taiwan, and do intensive language studies for a year there. That was the 1988-89 school year.
By the time we got to the end of the school year, my Chinese was actually getting pretty good. I was reading all these breathless news articles about what started off as just a commemoration for Hu Yaobang and then became the mass protests and the demonstrations—not just in Beijing, but all over China. I had planned to teach a little English when I was in Taiwan to earn some money to backpack around the mainland. And so, I was like, “Wow, this is great: Woodstock in Tiananmen Square. I’m going to bring my Frisbee and a sleeping bag, and this is going to be awesome.”
I left Taiwan, I think it was June second, and I had to transit Hong Kong and then get to Guangzhou and get on a 3-day, 3-night train ride from Guangzhou to Beijing. The last thing I saw was newspaper articles about the troops and the people eating baozi together and drinking tea, and it looked like the party was just getting bigger. I was getting even more excited to go there.
I arrived in Beijing on June the fifth, the day after the massacre. I didn’t really hear anything for the three days that we were on the train. I showed up in post-June 4th crackdown Beijing on the 5th with really very little clue as to what had transpired. I started walking towards the square with my little backpack, with my Frisbee in it, and my ping-pong paddle, and I was kind of walking through a war zone. There were burnt-out buses and bloody stretchers on the side of the road, and it almost felt like a scene from A Tale of Two Cities or something. It really felt like Beijing was like Paris, 1789. People were coming up to me and asking when the Marines were going to land and get rid of these guys. I made it all the way up to the square, where there was a huge crowd of people, and again, people were talking to me. My Chinese was okay, so I understood a decent amount of it. Most of it was just angry stories about what they had been through over the past 24-36 hours.
We were in a giant crowd of people, right there on the edge of Tiananmen Square, when there were gunshots over our heads. We all ran to the side of Chang’anjie, and then a bunch of tanks came out, and we all turned around, and one guy had not run. And that was the infamous Tank Man. I had a camera—not a very good one, and I was pretty far away—but it managed to take a couple of shots of this incredible act of bravery. Tanks are pretty darn scary, up close and personal, and this guy was standing right in front of the tread. I got to see that firsthand, and the whole experience of that, getting off the train, walking through this battle scene all the way up to the square, and having this one guy defy the entire column of tanks—it left a deep, deep impression on me.
I stayed in Beijing for a couple more days. The revolutionary fervor lasted about 24 more hours, and then it was pretty clear the boot was coming down, and it was coming down hard. Then no one would even look at me, let alone talk to me. So, rather than spending the whole summer backpacking around Beijing, I instead got a flight out to Finland and went and visited my brother in Europe, and did not actually spend the whole summer on the mainland as I had planned. It was just too depressing after the crackdown, but it was probably the most historic thing I have ever seen with my own eyes.
I was definitely interested in making China, somehow or another, part of what I was going to do with a good chunk of the rest of my life. Fortunately, I transferred to Stanford and got a degree there in East Asian studies and made my way into the foreign service, and have probably spent half or more of my foreign service career either serving at a post in China or back in DC working on China policy. So that was a very formative experience. It certainly was a pretty visceral illustration of what the Chinese Communist Party is willing to do to stay in power, but it was also a very visceral demonstration that people, even in the most adverse, hostile circumstances, are able to summon up the courage to stand up for what they believe in in ways that are truly shocking.
EB: Reflecting on your decades of experience at the state department, what were some of the defining moments in US-China relations? Do you see the current period as a departure from the norms that have governed US-China relations previously?
JF: I have seen a pretty full spectrum. My first tour was in Guangzhou and Chengdu, and this would have been in the middle of the ‘90s. We were still living with the political aftermath of Tiananmen, but Deng Xiaoping had already done his Southern Tour, and economic reform was now the flavor of the day. It was actually a pretty exciting time. A lot of the Chinese friends that I made—some of these were people that had actually been involved in the demonstrations back in 1989—hadn’t given up on their hopes of a more open China, but I think they were convinced that the way to do that was to get rich first and develop the middle class. There were private entrepreneurs who were taking advantage of the opening Deng Xiaoping had provided to make some money, get rich, and push things along that way.
My first tour back in DC was at the end of the 90s. I was working on the State Department’s China desk while the Clinton administration was working very hard to pass permanent normal trade relations for China to facilitate its accession to the WTO. I was lucky to be a guy from the desk who got detailed to the White House to rally Congress to pass the legislation required for this legislation to grant China normal trade relations, which was quite exciting. This was a fairly bipartisan effort that was making the same bet that a lot of these young friends I had had in Chengdu were making, which was that economic reform over time is probably a slower but steadier way to make progress on other aspects of China becoming a member in good standing of the international community—maybe not a full-blown democracy, but perhaps a bit more respectful of basic human rights and the rule of law.
In my last couple of jobs, both in Beijing at our embassy and back here in DC, it was pretty clear that that bet had not quite paid off the way that folks had hoped that it would. When I say “folks,” I mean not just Americans but probably a lot of Chinese and people from other parts of the planet who have seen their optimism slowly squeezed over time, particularly after Xi Jinping came to power. He clearly wanted to turn China back to a much more Leninist approach to governance, with the party very much large and in charge not just of politics and the government but also the economy, academics, and the whole kit and caboodle. I still feel like the gamble was one worth making. I think there were chances that things could have turned out differently. And they still might. Xi Jinping is not immortal, and life goes on, and, as for the David Bowie song, everything changes except change, right? I’m still hoping that someday that gamble will pay off.
But right now, we’re in a phase of a relationship where things are pretty darn intense. We have a lot of tensions in the security area and the economics area, and human rights continues to be an area where there’s a lot of friction as well. I feel like I’ve seen the whole spectrum from very hopeful, optimistic days early in my career, coming after a very depressing, gruesome moment in June of 1989, but cautious optimism. And we’re now in a place where I think, thank goodness, we’re not enemies, and I don’t think anyone in the United States ever intends for us to become outright enemies, but we’re definitely competitors and even adversarial in a lot of ways, but hopefully that will change, and the trajectory in the future will tack back into a more positive direction.
EB: What is the view from Washington on China right now? What are the biggest issues in American statecraft toward China, and how can we improve them?
JF: I would say the institutional view, and I would make this assertion on a bipartisan basis, feels that we’re generally competitive across a number of parts of the relationship and adversarial in a few. The one exception to that is the most important one. That’s the president of the United States. I don’t really know that he has particularly formed views on the relationship. I think he could use everything in a very personalistic fashion, and he might view the relationship more as a function of how he gets along with Xi Jinping in any given moment than anything else. That’s a bit of a wild card, obviously. We’ll see what happens in the coming election cycles; Donald Trump is term-limited. Right now, he’s feeling all chummy with Xi Jinping after his visit to Beijing just a few weeks ago.
But that could change. I think he started off feeling similarly towards Xi Jinping in his first term. I think COVID and a few other things really soured him on that relationship, and then he got really negative on China. It’s very hard to predict with the current occupant of the Oval Office; he’s the guy that’s going to have the most impact on how the relationship plays out over the next couple years. Right now, he’s not only chummy but probably causing some concerns for a lot of our friends and allies—perhaps overly chummy. But I do think the president is probably swimming against a tide, both amongst a lot of his own advisors within the administration and certainly on Capitol Hill and, more broadly, amongst folks that do view China as a competitor, that China does not mean us well, and who are very skeptical of the People’s Republic of China.
EB: I would like to talk a little bit about your decision to leave the state department this past January. What exactly led you to leave?
JF: I had some real issues continuing to work for this administration in a position at my level. I was basically the senior career guy, our Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, but some of the things going on at home, in particular, what was going on in Minneapolis with the ICE siege or crackdown, and in the foreign policy space, January was also the month when the president and a lot of his top officials from the White House were basically saying that military force was an option for taking Greenland from Denmark, which happens to be one of the more pro-U.S. European NATO allies that we have. Now, that wasn’t anything that fell into my area of responsibility. I was an East Asian Pacific guy, but trying to explain why that was okay to our allies, whether the Australians, or the Japanese, the Filipinos, or the Koreans, I didn’t want to have to try and defend that sort of a policy position to folks that I know are absolutely rock-solid allies of ours. I wasn’t able to follow the lead of the Commander in Chief, and so, I decided it was time to retire.
EB: We just had the summit between Trump and Xi. What do you see as the biggest flashpoints in US-China relations right now?
JF: I think the real worrisome thing about the summit wasn’t so much the bilateral between the United States and China; it was the treatment of Taiwan. What was really troubling is what President Trump said afterwards. He basically said that he and Xi Jinping had spent some time talking about Taiwan in general and the provision of U.S. arms to Taiwan in particular. This administration, to its credit, did maybe an $11 billion arms sale to Taiwan a number of months ago. But there was another arms package in the works, worth about $14 billion. And Trump told the media that he had very explicitly discussed that with Xi Jinping, and someone asked him about the six assurances, which were some guarantees that the Reagan administration had made to Taiwan, saying we’re never going to consult with China on what kind of weapons we’re going to sell Taiwan to protect themselves from China. Which makes sense—why would you ask the fox if he’d prefer you left the lock unlocked on the chicken coop? But here Trump was saying, “I talked with him about it, and I’m just going to have to think about it. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with that $14 billion arm sale.”
I think the fact that the president of the United States might indefinitely delay or even cancel an arms package to Taiwan while it has support from Capitol Hill, the Taiwanese want the weapons—they’re willing to pay for the weapons—and clearly Trump’s own executive branch bureaucracy was in favor of this. The Department of Defense and the Department of State had all cleared the proposed weapons systems to be sold. The fact that he might, after all of that, and because Xi Jinping had persuaded him to scotch this deal, do so would be a profoundly destabilizing event, certainly for the security of Taiwan, which, to a large extent, does depend on US support to deter a potential PRC reunification by force scenario. But I think for everyone in that part of the world.
If the United States is going to start asking Xi Jinping whether or not we should stand by our friends and allies in the Western Pacific, the Australians are going to be nervous, the Japanese are going to be nervous, and the South Koreans are going to be nervous. Now, I will say, Trump might very well end up saying, “Let’s go ahead with the arms package,” and, heck, let’s throw in another 10 billion. That’s a possible outcome. I don’t think people like being jerked around like that, but a lot of the potential damage, perhaps, would not be realized if he does end up going through with this in a somewhat reasonable time frame. If it were indefinitely postponed or outright canceled, I think that would be a historic moment in regard to the U.S. as a security guarantor in that part of the world. And it will not look good in the history books. It’ll be pretty much the Munich moment for Donald Trump in East Asia.
EB: Do you think the proposed boards of trade and investment will be effective with managing relations better?
JF: They might. If the Board of Trade ends up finding certain Chinese products that are not sensitive and where tariffs can be reduced somewhat to the benefit of U.S. consumers, and if the Chinese make some reciprocal moves that benefit U.S. farmers, workers, and entrepreneurs, I would not be opposed to that. I would be worried if we saw tariffs on Chinese goods drop to the same level or even lower than tariffs, say, for example, on Korea, or Taiwan, or Japan, or European treaty allies, friendly democracies. I would not want to see China being preferred as a trade partner, given all of the issues that it presents, both economically, with unfair subsidies and industrial policies, and politically and geostrategically.
In terms of investment, there’s a lot of debate on whether we ought to be looking to reverse the playbook and maybe invite some Chinese companies that are now world leaders in electric battery manufacturing to come to the United States and open up shop here. I would be open to considering some sort of investments along those lines. I think we do have to keep a very skeptical attitude. Certainly, flows of data could potentially be quite problematic; you would have to have some safeguards about that. And Xi Jinping does keep pretty much the entire business sector state-owned. If he thinks there are some intelligence or security benefits to be derived from some operations of some company doing advanced manufacturing here in the States, he would probably take advantage of it. But I do think there is the potential that net benefits could accrue to the United States, so we should at least consider those, but just be careful and consider the safeguards that we would set up around any sort of surge and Chinese investment in sectors where they’re actually world leaders now. We could potentially learn a trick or two from them.
EB: You had started to talk about Taiwan earlier. KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun recently met with Xi Jinping and then went to DC. What kind of state are US-Taiwan relations in at the moment, and do you see Taiwan heading toward reduced tensions with Beijing or so much appeasement that it risks permanently losing autonomy?
JF: I think a lot does depend on what happens with these arms sales. I’m actually going to be taking a trip out to Taiwan myself in about 2 weeks. We’ll definitely be very curious to see what the state of play is there with both officials and folks outside of government. I don’t think that the current administration of the DPP, William Lai, is going to change its colors. The short answer is I’m not sure the impacts yet because we don’t exactly know what’s going to happen with Donald Trump. So this could play out in any number of different ways. Certainly, it has put President Lai in a very awkward political situation. He had to expend quite a bit of political capital to get the Taiwanese legislature to fund these arms purchases that they’ve been making from the United States.
He’s made the argument, which I think is a perfectly justifiable one: “The guys across the strait, I don’t know if they’re gonna actually invade or not, but they’re certainly preparing to invade, so we have to be prepared to defend ourselves. To do that, we’re going to need to arm ourselves with the appropriate types of weapons systems.” I think he forced some pretty tough votes through the legislative Yuan, got them, and he was getting quite a bit of pressure from people like me back in the day, working for the U.S. government to make those appropriations, to pass them through the legislature. And now that he’s done that, and having the president say, “I was talking to Xi Jinping, and I’ve got second thoughts about that $14 billion arms package that they just voted on” clearly puts them in a top spot politically. It’s too early to tell how this is all gonna play out.
I certainly was tracking Cheng Li-wun. I think the DPP has historically been very skeptical of tying Taiwan’s future to the mainland. She obviously takes a very different tack on that. I am quite happy to leave that up to Taiwan voters. If in some future election, they want to return the KMT to power, I think the United States should respect the will of voters, in every country on the planet that is fortunate enough to have a democratic system for choosing its leaders. But right now, William Lai is in charge, and he is taking the threat from across the strait pretty seriously. I just hope that Donald Trump does the right thing, and we actually decide to go ahead with his arms package. If so, as I said earlier, I think that will make a lot of people all over that part of the world a lot less nervous. It won’t completely calm everyone’s nerves because there’s always the chance that Trump will do something crazy—just wait one more news cycle. But this is the big thing everyone’s looking at.
EB: You’ve talked a bit about other actors in the region, and you’ve engaged with China’s neighbors, who are definitely less than pleased about its attitude towards Taiwan. We’ve seen Japan’s Prime Minister Takaichi and President Marcos of the Philippines make direct comments about their role in the Taiwan conflict recently. How do you see regional tensions changing under this era of Trump and Xi’s leadership, and do you expect these tensions to escalate in the near future?
JF: I think there is a very legitimate concern, all around the region, about the far more assertive, even aggressive, muscular foreign policy approach that Xi Jinping has taken. I think he really has this conception of China as the old Middle Kingdom, where they expect to be the big power in the neighborhood, and everyone needs to be deferential to them. We’re seeing this work out—not just in the cross-straight context where we’re seeing very provocative military exercises, overflights, circumnavigations—but in cyberspace, economic coercion. We’re also seeing it in the South China Sea. The Philippines has had a number of very rough encounters with the Chinese Coast Guard and so-called fishing vessels. The People’s Liberation Army is fortifying outposts in the South China Sea at a pretty rapid clip. We’re seeing intimidation in the East China Sea against the Japanese.
Certainly, the Prime Minister’s comments about forced reunification with Taiwan having some serious ramifications for Japan’s own national security were not taken well in Beijing. I do think there is a perception that we are now dealing with a much more aggressive PRC, and I think folks are saying that means we need to work closely with our other friends and other allies; we probably need to take the advice coming from the Trump administration and previous administrations to spend more money on our own defense now and get a lot more serious. That’s all positive, and I will give credit to Trump, both in his first and this current administration, for pushing on that.
However, once folks get the sense that perhaps the United States doesn’t plan to stick around as a sort of security guarantor in the Western Pacific, whether we’re talking treaty allies or the Taiwan Strait scenario, folks are going to say, “This was all fine when I had a big guy that had my back. But if that guy is nowhere to be seen, I have a big guy right here, right in front of me.” Eventually, if people lose confidence in the United States’ security presence in that part of the world, they’re going to be forced to be much more accommodating of the PRC, because there will not be that countervailing other big guy to back him up. That’s a real concern, and that’s how I see this Taiwan arms sale: it’s the perception that Xi Jinping can persuade or bully or get into Donald Trump’s head and convince him to reduce the seriousness of U.S. commitments to its partners in this part of the world. That would be the major change in the security architecture of this part of the world. We’ll have to make a pretty major adjustment to that if that turns out to be the case. And I sure hope it doesn’t.