On Wednesday afternoon, President Donald Trump plans to be on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, waiting for the plane carrying Chinese President Xi Jinping to land — a gesture he has never before extended to a visiting head of state. U.S. protocol calls for leaders to be received at the White House; the rare exceptions have been for the pope and, 67 years ago, for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. When Trump visited Beijing in May, China upgraded its own protocol for him, but even so Xi didn’t come to the tarmac himself — Vice President Han Zheng handled the airport reception.
Trump’s planned greeting, if realized, would amount to a significant gesture of respect for Beijing, and a signal of how much the meeting matters to Washington.
For both leaders, the choreography may be the easiest aspect of the encounter to fully control. While analysts who closely study the U.S.-China relationship don’t expect major breakthroughs. they agree on its simple main point: The show must go on.
“The visit is the message,” said former U.S. Ambassador Edgard Kagan in his preview of the summit for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank where he is senior adviser and Freeman Chair in China Studies.
Managing the US-China relationship, Kagan suggested, can only be done through regular engagement at the leader level. And both Trump and Xi seem to share the belief that he is the only one capable of managing the other. Given the tensions between the two superpowers, “the definition of whether or not…constructive strategic stability is still holding is whether or not the two leaders are meeting right now. That’s the definition,” said Scott Kennedy, who heads CSIS’s monitoring of Chinese business and economics.
This week’s Trump-Xi meeting could well set the tone for November’s meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in Shenzhen, China, and December’s G20 in Miami.
All the Buttons Are Labeled “Please Don’t Touch”
Perhaps the most sensitive issue between the two superpowers is the level of U.S. military support for Taiwan, which Beijing considers a breakaway province destined for reunification. Trump has held a roughly $14 billion Taiwan arms package for months without moving it forward. Japan’s Kyodo News recently reported that China asked the U.S. to maintain that stance on new Taiwan arms sales ahead of the summit, and some analysts have said Beijing could reconsider Xi’s visit entirely if Washington moved forward. Though some China-watchers see only a restatement of Beijing’s familiar “red line” signaling rather than a genuine threat to cancel, the warning echoes what’s been building since the May summit. For now, the arms sale in question remains paused, and Trump has echoed Beijing’s framing on distance and stakes: “The last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles away,” he said in May. Beijing will likely read him hewing to that line as a win, whatever else comes out of the summit.
Then there’s AI. In an interview with MBN, Xiaomeng Lu, director of geo-technology at Eurasia Group, pointed to the joint advisory U.S. intelligence and security agencies issued this month on Chinese “model distillation,” warning that some Chinese companies illegally misuse U.S. intellectual property. That was “just the beginning” of possible U.S. escalation on the matter, she said.
Lu said a Chinese embassy official told her that Beijing would view the placing of any Chinese AI company on the Commerce Department’s Entity List as a “nuclear option” prompting forceful retaliation. AI distillation sits at the center of a fierce U.S.-China contest over frontier models and the broader AI stack. The U.S. holds the edge with chips and export controls; China holds leverage with rare earths. Both sides are sizing each other up. American labs still lead at the frontier, but Chinese startups have repeatedly shocked the field every few months, achieving real performance with far less computing power.
In short: both sides have escalation tools at hand that they would rather not use yet.
What Can Actually Be Solved
In CSIS’s preview of the summit, Kagan said Beijing expects roughly $30 billion in tariff relief in exchange for following through on its pledge in May to increase its purchase of U.S. agricultural products by $17 billion over the coming years; it is running significantly behind on that, and Washington expects to extract more purchase pledges to boot.
Lu’s expectations are similar. The U.S. wants to extend its tariff relief plan by six months, while China wants it nailed down for at least a year, she said, predicting that those terms as well as U.S. access to rare-earth minerals will get renewed rather than resolved. In her judgment, the “low-hanging fruit” on trade are agriculture, energy, and Boeing commercial aircraft. Tech investment announcements, by contrast, are much less likely, she said. The domestic political environment makes it hard for Chinese tech executives to unveil anything substantial on U.S. soil right now, regardless of their presence in Xi’s delegation.
Beijing’s core grievance is that Washington keeps extracting trade and investment concessions from China while simultaneously tightening export controls on the very tech hardware and software China needs, Yawei Liu, who directs the Carter Center’s China Program, wrote in a recent essay on his Substack, US-China Perception Monitor. From Beijing’s view, that’s a one-way ratchet rather than a stable trade regime, and it explains why Chinese negotiators keep circling back to tech restrictions even in conversations that are nominally about tariffs.
On AI, there’s a fresh signal that bears watching: U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Vice Premier He Lifeng met Sept. 20 and proposed a formal U.S.-China AI Dialogue, with a notification mechanism for AI incidents that rise to a national-security level.
What the Middle East Should Be on the Lookout for
On Iran, Washington’s assessment of China’s role has been upbeat. At the G20 Finance Ministerial earlier this month, Bessent said in a “fireside chat” that the U.S. and China have “more common ground than differences” on Iran.
Kagan expects Trump to press Xi directly on whether China’s concerns about supply security could translate into real pressure on Tehran to reach a settlement. Kagan noted at the CSIS briefing that China has been buying more oil on the global market and pulling back specifically from Iranian crude.
According to CSIS’s Bonny Lin, that shift is driven by the difficulty of moving oil safely through the Strait of Hormuz. She added a telling detail: Xi kept his contact with Iran’s president at the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Kyrgyzstan so brief and low-key that Chinese state media didn’t even report a meeting.
The pattern, Lin and others suggest, is that Beijing wants to be seen as engaged across the Gulf broadly but is careful not to be seen as too close to Tehran specifically.
Beijing’s caution on Iran sits alongside a much bolder posture elsewhere in the region, where its economic and trade influence is growing fast. On the tech front, Jensen Huang from Nvidia is expected to attend Trump’s state dinner alongside Xi’s own delegation of Chinese tech executives. It will be a visual echo of the same AI-chip contest playing out on the ground in the Gulf, where Nvidia outbid Huawei to build Egypt’s AI data centers.
On the military side, China has spent the last year building a quieter, harder-to-categorize presence. China was expected to join Russia and Iran in “Maritime Security Belt” naval drills in the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year, but when Beijing’s state media reported the exercises’ conclusion, it made no mention of Chinese participation. While direct military backing for Tehran remains unlikely, Beijing has been willing to provide some support short of that, including satellite imagery and chemical precursors for missile propellant, said Ryan Brobst of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank.
Chinese satellite intelligence-sharing reportedly helped Iran target an attack in Jordan in July that killed three U.S. soldiers. And as a CSIS satellite-imagery report revealed this week, an antenna array at a Chinese military base in Djibouti has been upgraded with an eye to monitoring signal intelligence throughout the wider Middle East. Brobst said Trump should press Xi to stop such sharing, as sanctions on the Chinese firms involved “are not going to take the satellites out of the sky.”
None of that points to a formal Beijing-Tehran alliance. But taken together with the AI-infrastructure push, it reflects the U.S.-China regional rivalry that Gulf governments see growing in intensity.
Neither China nor the United States wants a rupture of their delicate and all-important relationship, but the tensions that fuel it are by no means abating. A managed, tense equilibrium, not resolution, is the likely deliverable from this week’s summit. Both leaders would rather see another head-of-state meeting put on the calendar, at APEC or the G20, than a break that could augur much bigger trouble in the future.
