EMILY FENG, HOST:
President Trump is back in the U.S. after a multi-day high-stakes visit to China to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Speaking to press in Beijing, President Trump hailed the visit as a success.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This has been an incredible visit.
FENG: Was it incredible? Well...
SCOTT TONG, BYLINE: No big breakthrough. I have to say, none was expected.
FENG: That's Scott Tong, host of NPR and WBUR's Here & Now. He was in China reporting on the meetings, and we reached him in Beijing.
TONG: The American president said he got what he called fantastic trade deals.
FENG: Trump said China will buy 200 Boeing airplanes and a lot of soybeans from American farmers.
TONG: But not many specifics and no confirmation of any trade-specific deals from the Chinese side. What President Xi Jinping got is statements of stability. Not a really exciting sounding word, but, you know, China has been wounded by the U.S. trade war, by the war in Iran depriving it of crude oil that it needs. So stability is actually something that's really important.
FENG: So statements of stability, but not much to know in terms of concrete changes to diplomatic or economic policy. And on the issue of Taiwan, the self-governing island which Beijing claims as its own, there was little to report during the trip, though Trump has since described potential U.S. arms sales to Taiwan as an important negotiating chip with Xi Jinping. In addition to reporting on diplomatic news, Scott Tong told me he also used his time in China to dig into some stories touching on his own Chinese heritage.
You reported this incredible piece about your grandfather, this painful and kind of hidden chapter in your family history that unfurls in Shanghai. Tell me about his story.
TONG: In Shanghai, I got to go to the street where my mom grew up and her family in what's called the former French Concession of Shanghai. And that is where, when the Communists came, my mother and the children and their mother went to Hong Kong, which is a British colony. And then her father, my grandfather - he stayed back to run the family business, which was a school there.
Well, the police came in 1951 and arrested him, and his crime was something that, in my family, has barely been talked about 'cause it's very shameful. He was what's called the collaborator during the Japanese occupation. So when Japan occupied China in the late '30s up until the end of World War II in 1945, in many cities, they needed people to work for them. And my grandfather, for whatever reason, you know, went back to his hometown of Wuhan (ph) and took jobs working for the Japanese, doing food distribution and other things.
And so the question is why? And interestingly, you know, I spoke to a scholar who said, you know, collaboration is very complicated, and people do it for all kinds of reasons. They may need food for their family, or they may be blackmailed into it. There were gangs that forced people - right? - to collaborate, work for the Japanese. And if you didn't, you could be beaten, you could be thrown in jail, your family member could be tortured. So the idea is, collaboration is not so black-and-white, and it became a much more complex picture. And that was a fascinating interview I did as part of this story.
The other part of the story was, I reported on what happened to my grandfather after that, and he was sent to a labor camp, a gulag in Western China, the mountains all the way on the other side of China. Up to 8 million Chinese prisoners or so were sent there, and most of them didn't come back. My grandfather didn't come back. But I did get to talk to a survivor - he's 89 now - who talked about the horrific conditions there, where they were forced to work, how cold it was there, how frigid the tents were.
And I've heard this from other people in the camps, that all you think about when you're there is food - is eating food because there's hardly any. And he told me something others have told me - that if you didn't steal food, you didn't survive. So it was a very painful part of Chinese history.
In the end - and I did research this a few years ago - in the end, I went to the labor camp where we think my grandfather was and, on the advice of a government official, kind of grabbed some soil from the ground as a symbol of where he lived and where he died and took it back to the States, where he is buried - in a way - next to his wife in Houston.
FENG: Wow, Scott. Now that you know this story...
TONG: Yeah.
FENG: How does that inform the way you think about and report on China going forward?
TONG: I guess it informs a longer view I have of China. And this is also in my mom's family. Her mother was born and had bound feet. And then when she was young, somebody decided to unbound her feet and send her to a school run by American missionaries - middle of nowhere, China. So that was her connection to the outside, and that was an early part of the U.S.-China relationship, I guess.
You know, a century ago - and you know this, Emily - the Americans built universities that are still standing in China. They built hospitals that are still standing in China. Over the years, the U.S. sent companies, investment, technological know-how and engineers. And, you know, a long view is that when China's doors were open, when U.S. doors were open, this helped China to become where it is today. It wasn't always adversarial.
Of course, the relationship has changed now. It is one where it's seen the two largest economies in the world, and there are a lot of tensions. But where did they get here? Well, the U.S. and China kind of worked together for a large part of that story.
FENG: President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are going to be meeting several times more this year.
TONG: Yeah.
FENG: Given all that history, given the upcoming diplomacy, what might this mean for U.S.-China relations going forward?
TONG: I guess the question is the word stability that the Chinese have been using many times coming out of this meeting. I mean, 2025 between the U.S. and China was a tumultuous year. So if 2026 can calm the waters, we would look for the two leaders to perhaps call off a trade war - each side is still threatening the other that, we're not going to give you what you need - and perhaps, under the banner of stability, for the two countries to decide kind of going forward that they're not going to surprise each other because 2025 came with a whole lot of surprises, Emily.
FENG: Scott Tong is the host of NPR and WBUR's Here & Now. Thank you.
TONG: Thanks, Emily.
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