As United States President Donald Trump meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing amid ongoing trade tensions, strategic rivalries, and the shadow of conflicts elsewhere, the world watches the two largest economies navigate a relationship defined by deep interdependence, fierce competition and persistent risks of conflict. Since Nixon’s 1972 opening to Mao’s China and Deng Xiaoping’s reforms from the late 1970s, the Sino-US dynamic has defied simple categorisation. Is it now hurtling toward Lenin’s predicted inter-imperialist war, or does it exemplify Kautsky’s “ultra-imperialism” – a cartel of capitalist powers cooperating to jointly exploit the world?The evidence points to a complex mix: elite-driven integration and transnational class alliances (Kautskyian) alongside structural contradictions, military rivalries, territorial disputes and zero-sum competition that Lenin foresaw. Neither pure theory fully captures it, but a Gramscian-Kautskyian synthesis – emphasising hegemonic projects, elite networks, and ultra-imperialist tendencies with underlying tensions – offers sharper insight. Trump’s transactional visit, complete with US CEOs in tow, embodies this duality.A readout from the first day of the summit declared a “constructive strategic stability” goal – a new phrase used by President Xi. It centres on cooperation, measured competition, managing differences and “lasting stability”. Xi’s remarks reflect a clear signal that Beijing wants to frame US-China relations over the Trump presidency – long-term competition managed within limits.An almost perfect Gramscian-Kautskyian formulation, echoing Xi’s 2102 declaration that he wanted US-China relations to be characterised by “a new type of great power relationship”. From Opening to Integration: The Kautskyian TurnThe US opening to China in the 1970s was a classic great-power manoeuvre against the Soviet Union, but its deeper legacy was economic and ideological integration into the US-led liberal international order (LIO). Deng’s reforms unlocked China’s vast market and labour force for Western capital. American foundations, especially the Ford Foundation, played pivotal roles in building transnational elite knowledge networks that socialised Chinese intellectuals, policymakers, and officials into liberal norms, market-oriented thinking, and Western-style international relations scholarship.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.These networks facilitated China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 and its deeper integration into global supply chains. China emerged as the “workshop of the world”, while US firms generated substantial profits through offshoring production. This reflected ultra-imperialism in practice: national capitalist classes forming transnational alliances to exploit global labour and resources, with the United States acting as the hegemonic coordinator of the system. Some observers characterised this elite “symbiotic” relationship as “Chimerica”. Kautsky argued that such tendencies could lead to peaceful cartelisation rather than inevitable war, as advanced capitalist states found cooperation more profitable than conflict.Antonio Gramsci complements this perspective through his concept of hegemony – not mere domination, but the production of consent through intellectual and moral leadership, often exercised via civil society institutions and elite networks. Over several decades, Ford Foundation grants, academic exchanges and the activities of numerous other private organisations – amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars – contributed to the transformation of segments of China’s elite. This process fostered the rhetoric of a “new type of great power relationship” in Beijing, which not only obscured China’s deeper integration into US-designed institutions, but also reflected the willingness of sections of the Chinese strategic elite to avoid direct confrontation between the two powers. China’s ruling class benefited enormously from this arrangement. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party adapted in order to manage a hybrid state-capitalist system, learning how to operate within – and profit from – neoliberal globalisation while simultaneously delivering the economic growth that underpinned the legitimacy of its rule.For the West, and the US, China was converted into a stakeholder in the world system, as opposed to a supporter of anti-imperial and anti-colonial wars of liberation across Africa and elsewhere. Chinese intellectual currents increasingly shifted from engagements with Leninist revolutionary thought towards the reading of anti-revolutionary figures such as Carl Schmitt.The Chinese communist party is a hollow shell of its former Maoist self. Yet, this integration was never egalitarian. As in South Korea earlier, the LIO accommodated elites and business allies more than societies as whole. In China, dramatic growth coexisted with extreme inequality, internal repression and social unrest – outcomes that benefited transnational capital and domestic ruling blocs connected to the Party-State while ordinary workers faced exploitation.Trump’s current visit reflects this Kautskyian layer: deals on Boeing sales, agricultural purchases, and tech access are on the table. Interdependence persists despite tariffs and decoupling rhetoric. Both economies are locked into flows of goods, capital, and technology. Disruption hurts elites on both sides, incentivising “passive revolution” – tactical concessions from above to preserve core power relations.Contradictions and the Leninist ShadowLenin, however, would not be surprised by the mounting tensions. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he saw monopoly capital driving division of the world, leading to rivalry and war when uneven development shifts power balances. China’s rise, from poverty to near-superpower status, has altered global capitalism’s centre of gravity. Its Belt and Road Initiative, technological advances like electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, critical minerals, and assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific challenge US primacy. The global market has become an increasingly dense and contested space, as the rise of China and its multinational corporations has contributed to the relative decline of American capital.Security competition has intensified: just see how heated are voices regarding Taiwan, South China Sea, export controls on semiconductors, and military build-ups. The US “pivot” to Asia under Obama, Trump’s trade wars, and Biden-era continuities reflect fears of displacement. China’s state-led capitalism, subsidies and civil-military fusion violate liberal “rules” that once facilitated its rise and integration. What began as incorporation into the US-led neoliberal globalisation now feels like contestation. The rule-taker China looks to the American hegemon – a most jealous God – like a rule-maker in world affairs. To Lenin, this looks like inevitable inter-imperialist rivalry and the road to war.But do world conditions and relationships today conform to that degree of theoretical clarity? Or do we need another way to think about Sino-US relations?The Gramscian-Kautskyian lens captures this hybridity. Ultra-imperialist cooperation coexists with and is intertwined like a Gordian knot with hegemonic transition pressures. Elite alliances fray, shift and reconfigure as relative power balances change and structural transformations reshape the global political economy; US domestic discontent (rust belt losses from the export of manufacturing to China and other parts of the Global South) fuels backlash, while China’s leadership navigates nationalism and political risks attached to economic slowdown. Trump’s “America First” and CEO entourage show the tension: transactional deal-making to manage decline versus establishment fury demanding primacy.Recent events underscore the point about volatility. The Iran conflict exposes serious US limits, emboldening hedging by allies and partners. China holds tactical cards – rare earths, supply chains, and diplomatic leverage – but needs stable access to markets, oil and technology. Trump’s visit, shorter and less triumphal than 2017, occurs against China’s upper hand in some domains, yet both sides recognise mutual vulnerabilities. There is a correlation of weaknesses.Heading Where? Complex Critical MultiplexityNeither pure Leninist war nor stable Kautskyian ultra-imperialist peace fully predicts the trajectory. The relationship is a complex mix of interdependence, conflict, competition, and cooperation. Messy. Short-term deals are likely during this visit – trade truces, investment announcements – because elites on both sides benefit from managed tensions. In the longer term, structural contradictions are likely to persist in a context in which sustained economic growth becomes increasingly elusive: technological decoupling, military modernisation, ideological rivalry, and Global South hedging in a multiplex or messy multipolar order.A Gramscian-Kautskyian synthesis explains why. Transnational class alliances and Ford-style networks produced integration and partial socialisation (ultra-imperialism/hegemony). But capitalism’s uneven development, state rivalries, and domestic legitimation crises (Leninist pressures) generate counter-hegemonic tendencies. China challenges from within the order it partially joined, building parallel institutions while remaining entangled. But even its parallel institutions are designed effectively to complement the LIO where China and others feel shut out. Trump’s Beijing trip symbolises this moment of hegemonic crisis and power-shift. US relative decline – accelerated by its own order’s successes in empowering China – provokes fury in parts of the foreign policy establishment. Yet Trumpian pragmatism seeks deals to stabilise its mobilised and discontented domestic MAGA politics. China, with its own internal challenges – inequality, demographics, and slowing growth – prefers managed competition over hot war.As Chinese Americo-phile scholar Wang Jisi says, the relationship is not hot war or cold war: it’s more like a “hot peace”. President Donald Trump walks with China’s President Xi Jinping at the Zhongnanhai leadership compound, Friday, May 15, 2026. Photo: AP/PTIThe future is contested hegemonic transition with multipolar characteristics: fluid alignments, issue-specific cooperation (climate, pandemics), and persistent security dilemmas. War is not inevitable but risks of miscalculation are real, especially over Taiwan. Ultra-imperialist tendencies may contain these contradictions, but only through fragile and difficult elite compromises that are unlikely to be readily accepted by nationalist constituencies on either side, particularly given the growing challenges of sustaining their respective regimes of wealth accumulation.Ordinary people bear the costs, of course, in trade disruptions, militarisation, or worse. As Trump and Xi shake hands amid protocol and pageantry, the deeper question remains: can elites reinvent hegemony for a plural world, or will contradictions produce greater turbulence? History suggests the latter is more likely without radical rethinking, driven by popular mobilisations and manifest discontents.The key lies less in choosing one dead Marxist over the other, rather than in recognising their insights apply simultaneously in this era of intertwined rivalry.Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City St George’s, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and writes the American Imperium column for The Wire. His Twitter handle is @USEmpire. He is the author of several books, including Foundations of the American Century, and is currently writing on the history of the US foreign policy establishment, and Trump and the crisis of American Empire.Bamo Nouri is a Visiting Lecturer at City St George’s, University of London, an independent investigative journalist and writer with interests in American foreign policy and the international and domestic politics of the Middle East. He is the author of Elite Theory and the 2003 Iraq Occupation by the United States (2021)Ferran Perez Mena is Assistant Professor of the International Relations of East Asia at Durham University. His research focuses on transnational elite networks and elite studies in world politics, China–West transnational elite networks, and China in the Global South. He is the author of numerous articles and a book, Contender States and Modern Chinese International Thought (2024)