Trump and other G7 leaders are meeting without China. Is that a mistake?
No surprise there. It was unthinkable to imagine Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong brainstorming with U.S. President Gerald Ford and other leaders.
China was in turmoil and nowhere near becoming the economic giant it is now. Mao had also helped defeat French and US forces in Vietnam by militarily supporting Ho Chi Minh’s communists who came to power. So Mao would have been an extraordinary man if he had been present at the first six-nation Rambouillet summit and entered the G7 the following year when Canada joined.
But as US President Donald Trump and his G7 counterparts meet again in France from Monday, China’s exclusion from the unofficial club’s summits also seems odd, given its enormous influence on the world’s economic well-being and relations.
Simply put: Is there any point in the G7 without China?
Here’s a closer look:
Judging by the numbers, China will definitely be the favourite.
If it were determined solely by economic success, China would already be in the club. Its economy, swollen by decades of growth since Mao’s death in 1976, is now dwarfed by G7 nations Germany, Japan, Britain, France, Italy and Canada, leaving only the United States. From this perspective, a G7 summit without China is arguably like a football World Cup without 5-time winner Brazil.
China, which was “just a small, good-natured panda bear” in 1975, “has transformed into a great global dragon,” says G7 expert John Kirton of the University of Toronto.
“Many people understandably ask: Would the G7 and the global community be better off if China became a member of the G7 club? A reasonable answer is ‘Yes.'”
But that’s only for democracies
A year ago, Trump considered expanding the club to include China and said “it wasn’t a bad idea” when asked by a journalist.
But the unwritten rule of the G7 has always been that this only applies to democracies.
“Each of us is responsible for the governance of an open, democratic society dedicated to individual freedom and social progress,” the founding leaders said in Rambouillet in 1975.
Then China would not have raised this bar during Mao’s rule, which claimed millions of lives due to famine and revolutionary uprisings.
Under President Xi Jinping, China would not do this now either. By many measures, including the annual Freedom in the World survey, the World Press Freedom Index or Canada’s Fraser Institute’s economic freedom rankings, China lags far behind the G7 countries in terms of civil liberties.
China is G7’s top priority
China’s influence affects all G7 countries in countless ways. It is selling far more goods than it buys and is announcing a record trade surplus of almost $1.2 trillion in 2025, causing friction with other industrial powers. It controls the supply of important rare minerals. Its technological advances and increasing military power are making its rivals sweat. And it is the world’s largest emitter of climate-warming pollution.
All this means there will be an elephant in the room at the summit, which will be held Monday through Wednesday in the Alpine spa town of Evian-les-Bains, China.
As host, French President Emmanuel Macron gave the leaders time to talk about how to rebalance trade with China, amid fears that China’s rising exports of cars and other products could devastate G7 industries.
Cedric Dupont, who specializes in international politics at the Graduate Institute of Geneva, said the chemistry between Trump and other G7 leaders has been bad lately — because of the Iran war and other squabbles — but that China could be an issue that unites them.
“They agree on the same thing, you know: China is a problem,” he said.
Beijing looks cautiously
China’s Communist Party-led government has criticized the G7’s exclusivity in the past, portraying it as a relic of the Cold War, when the world was more divided along ideological lines.
But in a statement to The Associated Press ahead of the Evian meeting, China’s Foreign Ministry took a more nuanced view, saying that “the G7 should serve as a catalyst for solidarity and cooperation rather than reinforcing division and conflict.”
“Beijing is wary of the G7 because it sees the group as structurally aligned with the US-led Western power and increasingly as a place where China is discussed as a challenge or threat,” said Wang Zichen, a Beijing-based analyst.
But Chinese leaders cannot ignore this.
“China recognizes that the G7 still represents a very significant concentration of economic, technological, military and financial power,” Wang said.
China is seen as a threat to the integrity of the G7
Analysts say China’s admission to the club could undermine its integrity, not only because Beijing’s authoritarian system of government, its interests and its stance on Russia, Iran and other key issues are not compatible with the G7 democracies, but also because China’s presence tests long-standing alliances.
“Inside China would really be a Trojan horse,” Kirton said. With a Chinese leader at the table, “individual members may be tempted to break G7 ranks to gain special privileges from him on economic, critical minerals, digital technology and other issues they consider.”
Chris Alden, an international relations expert at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said adding China would “make it very difficult to operate.”
Russia’s example also poses an obstacle to China
The last expansion of the G7 (admitting Russia to membership in 1998) did not turn out so well.
The club froze Russian President Vladimir Putin, who seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and heralded the large-scale war that has been going on since 2022.
Trump said last year that excluding Russia was a “huge mistake.”
But Kirton said the experience convinced other leaders “that they should never take the chance of becoming full members of the fully democratic club again of a wholly undemocratic power.”
