What to watch for at the Trump-Xi summit

President Donald Trump stepped off Air Force One after landing in Beijing today, and the Chinese rolled out the red carpet: military honor guard, three hundred students waving American and Chinese flags, state banquet on the schedule. Trump, who flew in with a delegation of top cabinet officials and some of the biggest names in American business, pumped his fist. President Xi Jinping knows what makes this president tick, and he’s spent months preparing accordingly. Yet for all the pageantry, the expectation going in is a summit heavy on atmospherics and light on substance.

Purchase commitments on American agriculture, Boeing aircraft, and energy. The establishment of a “Board of Trade” formalizing (or rebranding) the existing channel between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Vice Premier He Lifeng for managing the bilateral deficit. Some tariff adjustments in non-sensitive sectors. Coordinated statements about the importance of reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps an agreement to time future US arms sales to Taiwan away from leaders’ meetings and keep package sizes within historical precedent. All these issues are constructive on the margin, none are particularly impactful.

That’s partly by design. After the tariff wars of early 2025 and the sustained turbulence since, neither side wants to rock the boat. Despite efforts to de-risk from one another, they still need each other too much to blow the relationship up – and they both know it. They see the next two days as a chance to pick up easy wins, build good vibes, and sustain positive momentum toward meatier negotiations later in the year, when Trump and Xi will meet as many as three more times.

They’ll defer the harder fights – over rare earths, tech export controls, investment deals – to what everyone expects will be a more substantial summit in September, closer to when the export-controls truce the two sides struck in Busan last fall expires. Both sides want to extend it, but neither wants to give away that leverage cheaply. Beijing is already signaling it wants to hold critical mineral access as a card for later this year, when the midterms create pressure for a splashier deal. Washington is sitting on pending export-control decisions that give it something to trade.

Critics will call it underwhelming. But given where US-China relations were a year ago – tariffs above 100%, rare-earth shipments cut off, a global recession in the offing – a pre-scripted summit that avoids a blowup and sets up more substantive talks down the road is a positive outcome from where I stand. Especially when you consider the alternatives.

For Xi, that’s probably enough. Holding rare-earth leverage and facing no political clock, he’s playing a long game. He wants the breathing room a thaw affords: stability on the external front while he manages a difficult economic picture at home, buys time for China’s techno-industrial buildout ahead of the 2027 Party Congress, and keeps Trump personally invested in dialogue as a buffer against the hawks in Washington pushing for a harder line.

Trump arrives in Beijing holding less and needing more. After being forced to TACO on his own tariffs, he’s now being weakened by the Iran war he started. His poll numbers are down, the midterms are closing in, and a president who runs on wins desperately needs one. He already delayed this trip by six weeks, waiting for the shooting to end before he could show up in China with credibility. He’s under pressure to get the Strait of Hormuz reopened, and he’s hoping Xi – whom he likes and respects as a peer – can use his influence with Tehran to help. Treasury Secretary Bessent has already publicly urged China to pressure the Iranians. Trump will repeat the ask directly to Xi.

Beijing has its own reasons to want the Strait open. China depends on Gulf LNG more than almost anyone, and with domestic consumption and the property sector still flat, a closed Strait depresses the global demand that absorbs China’s exports – the one growth engine China can’t afford to lose. Although Xi can’t unilaterally end the war and won’t force Iran to accept US conditions lest he look like Trump’s enforcer, what he can do is offer the Iranians economic incentives – reconstruction money, investment commitments, carrots he can dangle bilaterally without ever formally coordinating with Washington – and maybe give Trump a headline he can point to as a win at home. Iran’s foreign minister was in Beijing last week to discuss precisely what such an arrangement could look like. Xi could then frame this as a favor to Trump … and demand something in return accordingly.

This is where the real wildcard of the summit comes into play, because Xi could use this leverage to make the ultimate ask of Trump: an impromptu verbal statement explicitly opposing Taiwanese independence. Not “does not support independence,” which is the formulation every president since Richard Nixon has used, but “opposes independence” (or, even worse, “does not oppose peaceful unification”) – a break from decades of bipartisan strategic ambiguity that would instantly upend cross-strait dynamics and Washington’s relationship with its Asian allies.

Senior administration officials have categorically denied that the summit will bring a policy shift on Taiwan. Most everyone advising Trump – in the intelligence community, the Pentagon, the State Department, Treasury, Commerce, the White House, Congress – wants to hold the line. But none of those people can confidently say what Trump will do if the ask comes during the summit’s one-on-one sessions, when the president is alone with Xi and there’s no one in the room to pump the brakes. Trump’s top advisors have said privately they don’t know how he’ll respond to a leader he admires, who understands how to use flattery to extract concessions from him, who has already racked up personal goodwill with Trump (e.g., on TikTok), and who is about to shower him with the pomp and circumstance he so craves.

In Xi’s view, Trump offers a shot at something no other Chinese leader has had a realistic chance to attempt. This is the same president who has shown little interest in defending Ukraine, a sovereign country invaded illegally, and who told the Japanese prime minister to calm down on Taiwan. Someone who is much less ideologically adversarial toward China than his own bureaucracy and Congress. The window is narrow: unlike Xi, Trump is term-limited, and no future American president is likely to be as transactionally open to a deal on Taiwan. From Xi’s perspective, it would be a dereliction of duty not to try.

Few expect movement on this; no one around Trump can rule it out with certainty. If Trump did make as much as an offhand Taiwan statement, the consequences would be massive, eroding Taipei’s confidence in Washington’s backing and strengthening the hand of pro-unification voices ahead of the island’s 2028 elections. Irrespective of whether Trump’s successor walks it back or Congress blocks it, the status quo would be forever altered in Beijing’s favor. Every capital in the Indo-Pacific would reassess the value of US extended deterrence. Japan and South Korea, already alarmed about the direction of American commitments, would face a reckoning.

Most likely, none of that happens. The summit ends with positive optics, an agreement or two on trade, symbolic messaging on Iran, and an understanding to keep Taiwan quiet enough that it doesn’t blow up the relationship – with the harder fights deferred to later meetings, when both sides arrive outside the shadow of a Middle East war.

Whatever happens at this summit or the next, don’t expect a structural reset. The most important geopolitical relationship in the world remains fundamentally competitive. Even as they shake hands and cut deals, the US and China will keep racing to eliminate the dependencies that give the other leverage, preparing for the moment when neither side has as much to lose from a full-on conflict. Don’t mistake tactical stability for trust.