Answer to 3) As someone who viewed Xi and Lui He as entering into trade negotiations under sufferance because the way trade was working for the PRC before Trump suited China down to the ground. So forcing Xi into trade negotiations by Trump using his bully tactics and making the PRC lose face before the world was a sensitivity that bore serious resentment and in my view was always an undercurrent in the negotiations. That China dragged the negotiations over two and a half years is testimony to the hostility most of China's governing elite have towards the US administration.

I remind folks when Lui Hu in the Oval Office read China's acceptance of the trade deal earlier this year the proviso that he read that the Americans either missed or chose to ignore allowed for the fact that if no one wanted to buy the mandated agreed to commodities or manufactured goods then China wasn't going to buy them. What I gather is that China hasn't been buying some grains or pork or oil in the specified quantities the US had agreed to. Demand tapering off in China largely due to the pandemic and that proviso Lui Hu stated has been driving Robert Lighthizer and Bob Navarro.

My view at the time of the signing this year was that the deal wouldn't last and as push is now coming to shove Trump has realized what he signed up for didn't give him the overriding advantage he expected. You gotta read the fine print but Trump didn't do that in my view and so I am expecting he will find reasons to dump the deal. I actually think this outcome will suit China more than the Liberal Democratic pundits have been fretting over.

As I expect this will get more hostile, I expect China to off-load — if it hasn't already begun to do so — the US treasury paper it holds. When somebody in the White House publicly muttered that the US will not make good on it's promissory notes/interest payments a few weeks back, it's a signal that Beijing probably didn't miss.

If Trump threatens to cut all economic ties with China as he tweeted today, he should just do it and see how Wall Street handles that.

To your first question, I think Xi will weather any criticism from the economic mess inside China. His handling of the pandemic, coming as late as it did, as draconian as it appeared, when compared to the US numbers and Trump's glaring mismanagement and incompetence, makes him come out smelling like a rose. Anyway we will see come May 21.