Chinese President Xi Jinping during Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s visit to Beijing on May 20, 2026. (Kremlin.ru / Creative Commons via Wikimedia)
“Now is a good time to attack. Trump's weakness was fully on display in our Beijing summit last week.”
With these words, Weatherhead faculty member Andrew J. Nathan opens an audacious and original new commentary on Indo-Pacific affairs for the website Thinking Taiwan this week. In his essay “Reading Xi Jinping’s Mind: A Dialogue,” Professor Nathan tries to imagine how China’s supreme leader interprets cross-Strait relations, and the PRC's status relative to the United States, following his summit with American President Donald Trump in Beijing last month.
Central to Professor Nathan’s bold analysis is what the Thinking Taiwan site calls, in its introduction, “Taiwan's increasingly uncertain place within the evolving regional order.”
Andrew J. Nathan is the Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science in Columbia’s Department of Political Science. A veteran scholar of Chinese politics and foreign policy, he began sponsoring a series of Taiwan-focused lectures and other events at Weatherhead earlier this academic year.
At the outset of his piece, Professor Nathan offers a disclaimer: “This is my attempt to imagine what Xi Jinping might be thinking about Taiwan; though I do not necessarily agree with every idea I attribute to him.”
Thinking Taiwan supplements his attempt to parse President Xi’s worldview with essays by four eminent Taiwanese policy analysts and scholars who respond from a range of disciplines and interpretive standpoints.
Their perspectives both align with and diverge from Professor Nathan's throwdown in intellectually stimulating ways. Academica Sinica's Wu Jieh-min writes, for instance: “Strategic perception is not the same as strategic truth. Nathan seeks to read Xi's mind. I want to ask a complementary question: whether Xi is reading Taiwan's mind correctly.”
Thinking Taiwan is the online outlet of former Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s Thinking Taiwan Foundation. Originally launched in 2014, the site’s English-language edition was relaunched in May specifically to engage the international policy community in conversations and analysis surrounding Indo-Pacific security, the regional economy, and Taiwanese civic issues.
Links to Professor Nathan’s essay and the four follow-ups appear below, identified by author.
Reading Xi Jinping's Mind: A Dialogue
Andrew J. Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science in Columbia’s Department of Political Science, Columbia University
Reading Xi Jinping’s Mind 1: Reconsidering Andrew Nathan’s Warning
Chien-wen Kou, Distinguished Professor, Department of Political Science and the Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies, National Chengchi University
Reading Xi Jinping’s Mind 2: Reading Taiwan’s Mind
Wu Jieh-min, Distinguished Research Fellow, Institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica
Reading Xi Jinping's Mind-3: A Duel or a Tango over Taiwan
Chen-Dong Tso, Professor of Political Science, National Taiwan University
Reading Xi Jinping's Mind-4: How Transactional Diplomacy Risks the Indo-Pacific
Yifeng Tao, Associate Professor of Political Science, National Taiwan University
