Statue of Greek philosopher Thucydides in front of the Reichstag building in Vienna, Austria.
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BEIJING — China is adopting the idea of competition without conflict, with the aid of an academic concept.
“The Thucydides Trap can be overcome,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Thursday, arriving at the White House for talks with US President Donald Trump, according to an official Chinese statement.
This framework stands in contrast to the rhetorical question he posed at the May summit about whether the two countries could avoid the Thucydides Trap.
The “Thucydides Trap”, popularized by Harvard University professor Graham Allison in the early 2010s, refers to how tensions between rising powers and dominant powers have historically often led to war.
Thucydides was a general of Athens in ancient Greece. His historical account of the Peloponnesian War describes how Athens’ rapid rise to power alarmed Sparta and made war between the two city-states inevitable.
Allison has met with Xi and visited China multiple times, including for the World Economic Forum event in June 2026. Allison was the founding dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School, which trained many Chinese government officials over the decades.
The scholar previously served in the U.S. government as Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s and as Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
Mr. Xi mentioned the Thucydides Trap in a rare interview published by HuffPost in 2014.
“We all need to work together to avoid the Thucydides Trap, or destructive tensions between emerging and established powers or between existing powers,” Xi said.
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This week’s state visit to the United States by a Chinese leader will be the first in 11 years. Articles in state media after the 2015 trip noted that Xi’s interest in the “Thucydides Trap” reflected his view that it is mutual suspicion between great powers, rather than inevitability, that causes conflict as the term predicts.
Xi’s comments on overcoming the Thucydides Trap on Thursday followed his remarks about peaceful coexistence, saying the United States and China can have “healthy” competition without confrontation.
“It should not be a struggle to see who wins or loses, but a competition to catch up with each other,” Xi said, adding that the militaries of both countries should improve crisis communication and crisis prevention.
Cui Xiangjun, a professor at the School of International Relations at Renmin University of China, said in Chinese, translated by CNBC, that establishing this finish line – intense competition without military conflict – is the summit’s “most important political outcome”. “This brings certainty to unstable bilateral relations.”
President Trump’s comments on Xi’s arrival at the White House only emphasized general cooperation.
The US president has yet to comment on Taiwan regarding the summit, although Xi called on the US to “oppose ‘Taiwan independence,'” according to a transcript of the meeting between the two presidents read out by the Chinese government on Thursday.
—CNBC’s Anniek Bao contributed to this report.
