There will be a lot of pomp and circumstance, a lot of pageantry and a lot of tinsel. Concrete results, perhaps less. The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, lands this Wednesday in Washington for a long-awaited summit with his American counterpart, Donald Trump, which will try to maintain the entente between the two largest world economies and achieve concrete progress, although foreseeably limited, in the mechanisms agreed with Donald Trump during the Republican's visit to Beijing in May. Above all, it is about keeping the channels of dialogue open, managing the sources of friction and preventing a specific dispute from dragging down the entire bilateral relationship.
The tenant of the White House plans to go all out to pay tribute to his host: in an unusual way, he will come to meet him on the plane, and will welcome him with a mini-parade of military aircraft. After the sumptuous tributes he received in the Chinese capital five months ago, Trump wants to demonstrate to the leader of the emerging power that the United States also knows how to show off. “Every detail,” indicated the office of the first lady, Melania Trump, in a video about the gala dinner, “is carefully calculated.”
The program of this visit is almost identical to that of that trip: a formal welcome ceremony, a work meeting, a state banquet and, on Friday, a tea ceremony and a visit to an emblematic place in the city. In Beijing, Xi accompanied Trump to visit the Temple of Heaven. In this case, the two presidential couples will tour the National Archives in Washington, where the original declaration of independence of the United States is kept.
It is the first time that the Chinese president has visited Washington for a state visit since 2015, during Barack Obama's second term. Since then, Xi has traveled to the United States twice more, although in different formats: in April 2017, Trump received him at his private residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago; In November 2023, he traveled to San Francisco to participate in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit and hold a bilateral meeting with then-president Joe Biden.
The two leaders aspire to maintain the “strategic stability” to which they alluded in May and continue to move forward with the trade truce agreed upon last year at their meeting in South Korea, without the ups and downs in the bilateral meeting distracting them from their particular internal problems. The Chinese president wants calm to focus on his country's ailing economy. Trump has the Iran war on the table and a midterm election around the corner next November.
“It's about managing this relationship, which both are convinced can only be achieved through regular contacts between the two leaders,” says Edgar Kagan, of the CSIS think tank in Washington. “I don't think we are facing a thaw,” says Sun Chenghao, associate researcher at the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University (CISS), in a meeting with journalists in Beijing. Sun emphasizes that “strategic stability” consists of both parties trying to prevent a commercial, technological or security dispute “from dragging the entire relationship into a vicious circle.”
These are the issues that will dominate conversations between the two leaders and their teams.
Trade and investment
The first exam will be economical. During the tariff escalation in the spring of 2025, the United States imposed surcharges of 145% and China responded with levies of 125%. The subsequent negotiations reduced them substantially and the truce sealed by Trump and Xi in South Korea also reduced the US tariff linked to fentanyl from 20% to 10%.
That agreement also postponed new US and Chinese restrictions for a year, but it expires on November 10. Last Sunday's meeting in New York between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng did not result in an extension. Beijing aimed to extend the pause by two years. The United States only offered six months, in an attempt to preserve a pressure tool. But both governments want it.
Beijing intends to provide this truce with greater stability, especially in relation to critical minerals and technological controls, in addition to launching the Trade and Investment Councils created in May. On the table is a reciprocal reduction of tariffs for products considered non-sensitive for about 30 billion dollars. Washington, for its part, expects new Chinese commitments to purchase aircraft, agricultural products or energy, which Beijing intends to link to improvements in access to the US market. But the prospect of big deals seems to be fading: according to The Wall Street Journal, Xi's entourage will not include Chinese businessmen.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI will have much more weight than in May, especially after the warnings from the American technology giants about the dangers of this technology, the calls to stop its development and the refusal of Trump, who assures that the United States is in a race with its Asian rival for dominance of this industry: “Whoever wins artificial intelligence will win,” he has repeated on several occasions.
On Sunday, He and Bessent agreed to formalize a dialogue on AI, study a communication channel for incidents affecting national security and meet again in November during the APEC summit in Shenzhen (southern China).
Beijing will demand that Washington stop expanding controls on chips and computing capacity and advanced models, a policy that it considers has gone from protecting a few critical technologies to covering entire sectors.
"The United States and China will not accept anything that prevents them from continuing to compete on the merits of their technology. Both want to maintain the ability to sell their respective technological ecosystems abroad. This leaves a very narrow range of issues on which they can have productive conversations. Another point of friction they must address is the claim [in Washington] that much of Chinese AI technology is derived from American technology," says Aalok Mehta, director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence at CSIS.
Taiwan
Taiwan, the democratically self-governed island to which the United States supplies weapons but which China considers an inalienable part of its territory, will continue to be the most delicate issue. A $14 billion arms sale is pending that Taipei wanted to see approved before October. Washington may try to push it through by dividing it into tranches, but Xi is likely to push to block it at least until after the APEC summit in November.
The People's Daily, the official organ of the Communist Party, has warned in an editorial that mismanagement of the issue could lead both countries to "collision and even conflict." The text affirms that the Taiwanese independence movement is “a common enemy” and that controlling it constitutes an essential condition for the stability of relations.
Security and international conflicts
The crisis in the Middle East will be the main international conflict on the agenda. Trump wants to take advantage of the meeting to pressure Xi so that China uses its economic influence over Iran, of which it is the main buyer of oil, to force an end to a war that is almost seven months old.
Beijing also has a direct interest in de-escalation: the US naval blockade has prevented new Iranian shipments from crossing the Strait of Hormuz towards China and has reduced the Islamic Republic's exports from about two million barrels a day in March to about 250,000 in August. China will try to promote the path that Xi already defended in May: a permanent ceasefire, the resumption of negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program and the reopening of Hormuz.
The war in Ukraine will also be on the table, although so far both governments have only committed to maintaining communication and supporting a negotiated solution, without announcing any joint initiative. Xi will also plan the need to preserve stability in East Asia, an issue plagued by tensions over Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula and the US military presence in the region. Trump can present to Xi his intention to resume contact with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, although the margin to advance a hypothetical meeting between the two is limited: North Korea maintains that its status as a nuclear power is irreversible, while the United States, South Korea and Japan maintain the denuclearization of the peninsula as their objective.
Human rights
