“Both are worried about critics if they make too soft a deal,” said Michael Pillsbury of the Hudson Institute, a China scholar who occasionally advises Trump. “But neither one seems to understand how the other one thinks.”

Hudson Institute analyst Michael Pillsbury, an unofficial Trump adviser, countered that Biden subscribes to an outdated theory that China’s state-backed economic system will collapse, despite evidence that it has consistently surpassed projections and taken the lead in some cutting-edge technology. Trump “has a sense that America is being ripped off by China,” Pillsbury said, “and he was elected to fix it.”

“He had an uncanny ability to pick out only the most significant questions, then to drill down deeply,” Michael Pillsbury, a colleague of 45 years, said in an interview. “He developed an iconoclastic, contrarian image.”