China’s government has already undercut the faux-conciliatory message that Xi Jinping sent Donald Trump two days after the election.

Xi’s post-election message contained a boilerplate expression of goodwill and paeans to cooperation. The readout said that his message “noted that history tells us that both countries stand to gain for cooperation and lose from confrontation.” It also said that the bilateral relationship should be defined by “mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.” China Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s English-language propaganda outlet for global audiences, followed up with a similar message: “Everyone wins when Sino-US relations are good; everyone loses when Sino-US relations are not stable.”

But by Monday, Beijing proved that these are superficial appeals to cooperation, when its embassy in Washington responded to a scoop from the Financial Times. The newspaper reported that Taiwan was planning a massive, $15 billion arms purchase as part of an effort to placate concerns by GOP defense officials that it isn’t spending enough on its own defense.

Embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu followed up on X with a three-paragraph statement. “The U.S. should earnestly abide by the one-China principle and the three China-US join communiques, stop arms sales to and military interactions with Taiwan, and stop conniving at and supporting the separatists’ attempt to seek ‘Taiwan independence by force, so as to avoid further damage to China-US relations and cross-Strait peace and stability,” he wrote. Liu bolded that sentence to emphasize the point.

With that statement, China attempted to order around the incoming Trump team, less than a week after the election. The China hawks who are primed to staff Trump’s team almost certainly already knew that Beijing’s post-election messages were hollow calls for cooperation. After all, Beijing’s MO is to leverage its calls for “mutual respect” to cast its own positions as the only logical and peaceful resolutions to any given issue — when in fact those stance are hardline, maximalist stances benefitting the Party alone. They also undoubtedly remember that Chinese diplomats and other regime agents worked throughout the first Trump administration to undermine the White House’s trade policy by lobbying state and local governments to take Beijing’s side.

For their part, Chinese officials likely grasped that officials in the incoming Trump administration would not view calls for cooperation as genuine, so why bother? Xi’s message was a ploy to make Beijing’s unreasonable demands appear reasonable and to bolster its unearned international position as a proponent of peace and stability. That positioning, the Chinese leader and other Party elites likely assume, will serve the People’s Republic of China well when it inevitably clashes with the next Trump administration.