How the ‘No Surprises’ Summit Could Surprise Mideast

President Donald Trump, who arrives in Beijing on Wednesday evening for his first state visit of his second term, will get the full royal treatment: a welcome ceremony Thursday morning, a tour of the Temple of Heaven in the afternoon, a state banquet in the evening, and a working lunch with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday. 

The choreography is elaborate, but the agenda is modest. The summit is designed to be a carefully staged meeting of the two most powerful leaders in the world.

The signals coming out of both capitals over the past week point in the same direction: this meeting is built to stabilize the U.S.-China relationship, not to break new ground on it. 

Principal Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly told reporters on Sunday that the visit would have “tremendous symbolic significance” and focus on “rebalancing the relationship.” A second senior administration official said only that “both sides want stability” when asked whether the trade truce reached at last October’s Busan summit would be extended this week. That truce, struck on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in South Korea, paused the worst of the tariff escalation between the two economies and was the first face-to-face Trump-Xi meeting of Trump’s second term. 

That doesn’t mean the relationship is calm. Both leaders are simply choosing to manage the friction rather than pretend it isn’t there.

Trump administration officials appear to be lowering expectations the president himself may have helped raise with comments calling the meet-up “potentially historic.” That has drawn some concern Trump, for example, may soften the U.S. stance on Taiwan, a democratic ally of the United States that China considers part of its territory, in exchange for help with Iran.

But the tight timeframe of the summit and background briefings by administration officials suggest any shift in policy seems unlikely.

The message from Beijing has been similarly consistent for weeks. Foreign Minister Wang Yi has signaled that recent Trump-Xi exchanges have been positive, and state media has steered away from confrontation. 

That doesn’t mean the relationship is calm. Both leaders are simply choosing to manage the friction rather than pretend it isn’t there.

The CEO delegation tells the same story. Reuters reported that the White House is bringing the chiefs of Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm, Citigroup and Boeing, along with major beef and soybean producers. It is telling who is on that list – chips, finance, aircraft, agriculture. Each of those companies has been squeezed by the trade fight and would benefit from a loosening of tension. Nvidia’s sales in China have been trimmed by American export controls. Boeing has been waiting eight years for its first major Chinese order since 2017. Apple and Qualcomm count China as their largest single market. This isn’t a delegation to confront Beijing but to do business with it.

Both leaders want the relationship to hold. Trump needs an off-ramp from the Iran war and a clean foreign policy headline after a difficult spring. Xi needs to keep Washington steady while China’s economy absorbs the shock of a regional war that cut Chinese crude imports from the Gulf by 25 percent year-on-year in March. Neither has an interest in walking out of Beijing with a public fight.

Stakes for the Gulf

That doesn’t make the summit unimportant for the Middle East. Instead, it provides clear grounds for what to look for in the months ahead.

The visible deliverables will be the easy ones: a likely extension of the Busan trade truce, with Beijing reportedly seeking a year and Washington six months; a “Board of Trade” mechanism the White House has floated to identify mutual-interest areas like agricultural purchases; a long-awaited Boeing order, possibly for 500 737 MAX jets plus widebodies; and possibly an announcement on rare earths. None of it will reshape the region.

The real work will happen out of public view. The two countries are likely to come away from the summit with a better understanding of where each stands on three key issues.

The first is Iran, and this is where the stabilization frame frays. Since April, Trump has been pushing for two things: a Chinese commitment not to arm Tehran if fighting resumes and Chinese help keeping the Strait of Hormuz open. He wrote to Xi last month asking for both, and said publicly that he had received assurances on the weapons question.

Beijing isn’t lining up to bail out Tehran. It’s trying to be useful to Washington before the summit.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on Fox News last week and accused China of buying 90 percent of Iran’s energy and “funding the largest state sponsor of terrorism.” On Friday, days before the summit, the administration sanctioned three Chinese satellite firms for providing imagery that enabled Iranian strikes on U.S. forces. A senior administration official said in a pre-summit background briefing that Trump would “apply pressure” on Xi over the same issues during the talks.

Whether any of that pressure produces something concrete is the question worth watching. A public Xi restatement of the no-weapons pledge would give Trump something to take home. But if the readout comes back full of “constructive dialogue” language, Beijing has kept its leverage and walked away without giving up much of anything.

The Iranian foreign minister’s trip to Beijing on May 6 is a useful tell. Abbas Araghchi went because Tehran has run out of doors to knock on. Russia is not stepping up, Pakistan has hit its diplomatic ceiling, and no Gulf state is going to make Iran’s case for it. Beijing took the meeting because it cost nothing to take, and Wang Yi used the moment to publicly call for the war to end and the Strait to reopen. Beijing isn’t lining up to bail out Tehran. It’s trying to be useful to Washington before the summit.

Tech and Taiwan

The second key issue is the technology fight, where the Gulf is directly exposed. Beijing is reportedly asking Trump to announce a rollback of American export controls on chipmaking equipment and advanced memory chips at the summit, along with a commitment to no new technology restrictions in the future. Gulf AI hubs in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi sit right in the path of whatever the two sides settle on. Both governments have spent three years building their tech ecosystems on a mix of American and Chinese components. If Trump trades chip relief for Iran cooperation, the Gulf gets short-term breathing room and long-term ambiguity about who sets the rules of its tech sector.

If decades of careful U.S. policy can be reshaped for a short-term win on Hormuz, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi will draw their own conclusions about what their partnership with Washington is actually worth.

The third is Taiwan, and this is where Xi has the most to gain. The U.S. has long acknowledged Taiwan as distinct from the People’s Republic while avoiding any explicit support for the island’s independence – a deliberately ambiguous formulation that has held the peace for decades. Beijing’s goal at this summit, according to diplomats and China experts, is to nudge Trump into shifting that language from “we do not support Taiwan independence” to “we oppose Taiwan independence.” It sounds like a small change. It isn’t. And the worry in Asian and European capitals isn’t just that Xi asks, but that Trump trades the answer for help on Iran. For the Gulf, the question isn’t Taiwan itself. It’s what a Taiwan concession would say about how Washington values its other security commitments. If decades of careful U.S. policy can be reshaped for a short-term win on Hormuz, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi will draw their own conclusions about what their partnership with Washington is actually worth.

MBN’s China Tracker shows where Beijing’s real bets are. China’s trade with MENA reached $510.2 billion in 2025, roughly 1.7 times U.S. trade with the region. China’s trade with the six Gulf Cooperation Council states is nearly 30 times its trade with Iran. Beijing condemned Iranian attacks on Gulf sovereignty during the war, and in the same week, joined Russia in vetoing a Bahrain-led U.N. Security Council resolution on Hormuz shipping. The choice between Iran and the Gulf was made long before this summit.

What this week will signal is that the two largest external powers in MENA plan to coordinate their interests rather than collide over them, at least for now. It’s not for a dramatic outcome, but it’s what the region will be working around for the rest of the year.