When The World’s Most Powerful Leaders Meet: Inside American-Chinese Presidential Showdowns with Ambassador Nicholas Burns

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is set to visit the White House for the first time in a decade. Few have sat at the table as the American president negotiates with one of the most opaque Chinese leaders in recent memory. Professor Nicholas Burns — former U.S. Ambassador to China, Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Founder of the Program on Diplomacy and Statecraft at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Faculty Affiliate at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies — is one of them: “Everybody's on edge, on both sides. Nervous, on edge. Why? Because there's so much riding on the relationship between our two countries.” On the eve of Xi’s trip to Donald Trump’s Washington, Professor Burns joins Fairbank Center Faculty Director Mark Wu to break down how the world’s two most powerful leaders get together. We bring you inside the high-stakes maneuvering it takes to negotiate between the world’s most powerful countries. And we'll unpack what it all means for America, China, and you. Harvard on China is a production of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. The show is hosted by Mark Wu and produced by Frank S. Zhou. This episode was recorded prior to Chinese Minister of State Security Chen Yixin’s warnings on artificial intelligence in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace. Original Score by Troy Mao. News clips in this episode come from NBC, ABC, CNN, and the Harvard University Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.