Former Fox News star Bill O’Reilly traveled to China last week and wrote on his blog: “As soon as I booked a China trip as a gift for my college graduate son, the dance began. The Chinese were very respectful and accommodating.”
O’Reilly reported that he was invited by the Beijing Club for International Relations to address “some very powerful people in the Chinese government,” which he said “caught me by surprise.”
O’Reilly was told that he could not reveal the identities of the attendees, nor could he use direct quotes from the 90-minute event — but he did report that “The Communists want reunification above everything else.” O’Reilly added: “2049 will mark 100 years since Mao seized control. President Xi believes a deal on Taiwan will cement his legacy. It’s personal.”
[NOTE: O’Reilly refers to Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong seizing control of mainland China in 1949 and declaring the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The event ended the Chinese Civil War, as ousted Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT) — ruling party of the Republic of China (ROC) — retreated to Taiwan.]
He would have loved me!!! New photos here: https://t.co/JFaiyM7ko3 pic.twitter.com/AM0G6c0iS0
— Bill O’Reilly (@BillOReilly) May 28, 2025
O’Reilly suggested that Trump and Xi stop the “bickering” (“the bickering between the two nations must end”) and encouraged Trump — whom he called “maybe the best deal-maker in the world” — to work with Xi as Trump “successfully” did in his first term. O’Reilly wrote: “So let’s go, gentlemen. Keep your eyes on a Nobel Prize.”
Important column about my engagement with Chinese officials in Beijing. Hope you read it on https://t.co/rryWmyXLXa. https://t.co/XDe9vCTx3V
— Bill O’Reilly (@BillOReilly) June 1, 2025
Not everyone is on the same page as O’Reilly about Trump’s first-term success with Xi. J Capital Research founder Anne Stevenson-Yang, who testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission at its 2017 hearing on ‘U.S. Access to China’s Consumer Market’, said of Trump’s first-term trade war with China, “What China did was move its exports to other countries and move its imports from other countries as well. So it shifted the purchase of soybeans, for example, from the U.S. to Brazil.” Stevenson added: “So that wasn’t a useful policy.”
Taiwan, a U.S. ally in the region, has prospered under a longstanding, tacit promise that the U.S. would defend the nation against a Chinese incursion aimed at unilateral reunification.
The Taiwan Relations Act requires the United States to have a policy “to provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character” and “to maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.” It is otherwise unspecific about defense.
O’Reilly’s implication that this relationship may change so that Xi can achieve and celebrate reunification, as part of an East-West deal-making calculus that would, he says, net Trump and Xi a Nobel Prize — would mean upending the current power structure in the Asia-Pacific region.
O’Reilly’s schema for Trump’s Nobel Prize would also appear to contradict U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth‘s sentiments at an Asia-Pacific defense conference this past weekend, when Hegseth said: “Let me be clear: any attempt by Communist China to conquer Taiwan by force would result in devastating consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world. There’s no reason to sugarcoat it. The threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent. We hope not but certainly could be.”
Note: President Theodore Roosevelt became the first U.S. President to win a Nobel Peace Prize, in 1906. Since then, three other Presidents and one Vice President have received the honor:
- President Woodrow Wilson in 1920, for his efforts in ending the First World War and help in creating the League of Nations.
- President Jimmy Carter in 2002, for his efforts in finding “peaceful solutions to international conflicts, advancing democracy and human rights, and promoting economic and social development.”
- Vice President Al Gore in 2007, for his efforts to obtain and spread knowledge about climate change.
- President Barack Obama in 2009, for his efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation.