In a landmark diplomatic moment marking the first visit by a sitting US president to China in nearly ten years, former and current President Donald Trump is set to arrive in Beijing on Wednesday for a critically important bilateral summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, against a backdrop of simmering tensions fueled by the February US-led war on Iran that has added new strains to the already fraught relationship between the world’s two largest economies.
This upcoming meeting, the first between the two leaders on Chinese soil since Trump’s 2017 visit, will feature two days of high-stakes negotiations scheduled for Thursday and Friday, wrapped into a packed official itinerary that includes a formal state banquet and a ceremonial tea reception with senior Chinese officials. The agenda for the talks covers a wide range of longstanding and newly emergent flashpoints, from long-running disputes over US arms sales to self-ruled Taiwan and Chinese export controls on critical rare earth minerals to the two countries’ deeply interconnected but often contentious trade relationship. The ongoing conflict in the Middle East will also take a top spot on the discussion list: a senior anonymous US administration official confirmed to reporters earlier this week that Trump will push Xi to make concessions on Iran, as the White House pursues a negotiated deal to end the two-month-old conflict.
In the lead-up to the summit, signs of heightened security were already visible across Beijing on Tuesday. AFP correspondents on the ground reported that uniformed police were deployed to monitor major urban intersections, while transit authorities conducted routine ID checks for passengers on the city’s metro system, a common security step ahead of major high-level diplomatic events. Ordinary Chinese residents expressed a range of outlooks on the landmark meeting. 24-year-old Nanjing native Wen Wen, who was traveling through Beijing when speaking to AFP, called the visit a major event for global relations. She said she expected the summit to deliver at least some tangible progress, and shared her hope that both nations can work toward lasting peace despite widespread recent global instability.
Bilateral trade ties between Washington and Beijing have remained rocky for years, though the two sides have upheld a one-year truce in their costly tariff war, an agreement struck during Trump and Xi’s last meeting in South Korea last October. Trump has long criticized China’s persistent large trade surplus with the US, a grievance that led him to impose sweeping tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods during his first term in office. Accompanying Trump on his Beijing trip is a high-profile delegation of top American business leaders, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook, according to White House announcements.
The summit comes at a moment of significant economic uncertainty for China, which has battled years of sluggish domestic consumer spending and a prolonged systemic debt crisis in its once-booming real estate sector, issues that have weighed on global growth projections. Not all ordinary Beijing residents are optimistic about a quick resolution to longstanding bilateral rifts. Li Jiahao, a 30-year-old manager of a karaoke bar in central Beijing, told AFP he does not expect the meeting to solve every issue in US-China ties, though he remains hopeful for positive incremental outcomes. “Coming here and actually resolving the issues are two different things,” he explained. “China and the United States both have responsibilities as major powers. Only through friendship can we achieve mutual development and become stronger.”
The Iran war, launched jointly by the US and Israel on February 28, has thrown a new set of complications into the already tangled relationship between the two global powers. Trump previously delayed this Beijing trip once to focus on managing the conflict, which has effectively shut down commercial shipping through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a critical global energy chokepoint, for more than two months. China is Iran’s largest customer for crude oil, but the Trump administration has imposed sweeping unilateral sanctions to cut off all Chinese purchases of Iranian energy. Just on Monday, the US Treasury Department expanded those sanctions, blacklisting 12 individuals and entities—several based in Hong Kong—that it accuses of facilitating the sale and shipment of Iranian oil to Chinese buyers. When asked about the new sanctions at a Tuesday press briefing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun reaffirmed Beijing’s position that “China firmly opposes illegal unilateral sanctions.”
Another core sticking point for Chinese leadership remains longstanding US military support for Taiwan, the self-governing democratic island that Beijing claims as an inalienable part of its territory. Speaking on Monday, Trump said he was open to discussing US arms sales to Taiwan during the summit, and claimed his personal relationship with Xi would prevent any Chinese military invasion of the island. “I think we’ll be fine. I have a very good relationship with President Xi. He knows I don’t want that to happen,” Trump told reporters.