Power and pageantry: Ten things to expect from the Trump-Xi summit

In November 2023, former US President Joe Biden welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to the Filoli estate in Woodside, California, a country house once used as the set for the television series Dynasty. The symbolism was carefully stage-managed. Biden showed Xi a photograph of the Chinese leader at the Golden Gate Bridge, taken thirty-eight years earlier. Xi, by most accounts, looked pleased.

The two leaders then took a one-on-one walk through the manicured gardens. No interpreters accompanied them. Two men who, between them, exercise more raw power than any other pair alive strolled in near silence through the lawns.

“The goal,” a former White House China adviser later recalled, “was to show that the relationship had stabilised.” The walk showed something else entirely.

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This Thursday, US President Donald Trump lands in Beijing for a two-day summit with Xi Jinping, the first sitting American president to visit the country since he himself did in 2017. The two last met in Busan, South Korea, in October, where they agreed to pause a trade war that had driven tariffs on either side past 100 per cent. Much has changed since then. There is now a war in the Persian Gulf; oil is hovering near $100 a barrel; a Supreme Court ruling struck down Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs in February; and China has quietly concluded it is no longer the weaker party. Ten things to expect, none of them surprising, all of them consequential.

The first is an abundance of pageantry. The Great Hall of the People will be immaculate. Xi, who normally reserves his hugs for Vladimir Putin, will not embrace Trump, though Trump has publicly predicted otherwise. Both leaders will emerge to the cameras with pledges of co-operation. This is not without value. Since the Iran war began in late February, Chinese officials have reportedly grown reluctant to engage with American business counterparts. The image of two presidents in the same room signals, within China, that such engagement is once again permissible.

The second is commercial deals that will be announced with fanfare and honoured selectively. Expect soybean purchase commitments (the Busan deal pledged twenty-five million metric tonnes annually through 2028) and a Boeing order, possibly the company’s first large Chinese deal in nearly a decade. Boeing’s CEO Kelly Ortberg accompanies Trump. Citigroup’s Jane Fraser has confirmed she will be there too. A word of caution, however, is in order. In 2017, Trump’s first Beijing visit produced thirty-seven major deals worth more than $250 billion. Most dissolved quietly in the months that followed.

Third, the Board of Trade. The Trump administration has floated a standing bilateral body to manage commerce between the two countries, identifying strategic from non-strategic trade, applying high tariffs or export controls to the former and lower duties to the latter, and providing a forum for resolving disputes before they escalate. The closest analogy is the managed-trade framework Washington attempted with Japan during the first Clinton administration in the early 1990s. It was later abandoned as ineffective and unmanageable. History does not repeat itself; it rhymes at inconvenient moments.

Fourth, dominating all else will be Iran. The war, now past its sixty-plus days, has closed the Strait of Hormuz, disrupted global oil flows, depleted American munitions, and brought a global recession measurably closer, in the IMF’s assessment. Trump wants China to lean on Tehran to reopen the strait. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi met his Iranian counterpart this week in Beijing, called for “greater efforts” on the strait, and simultaneously endorsed Iran’s “legitimate right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy". That is the formulation of a country that wishes to appear helpful without committing to anything.

Fifth, China negotiates from unexpected strength. Its April exports rose 14.1 per cent year-on-year, beating analysts’ estimates handily. It has quietly cut oil imports by roughly a quarter from pre-war levels, a three-and-a-half-million-barrel-a-day swing nearly equal to Japan’s entire daily consumption, through a combination of coal-to-chemicals substitution, strategic reserve management, and an “inscrutable” petrochemicals sector. Its rare-earth leverage remains intact. The Supreme Court’s February ruling against IEEPA tariffs removed Trump’s most potent economic weapon.

Sixth, the Taiwanese language dance. Beijing will push, perhaps subtly, for American formulation to shift from “does not support” Taiwanese independence to actively “opposes” it. Trump has already suspended a $13 billion arms sale to Taipei and agreed to sell Nvidia’s advanced AI chips to China. Beijing reads both signals with care. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan itself will study the summit readouts with forensic attention for any softening of phrases. They are right to do so.

Seventh, artificial intelligence will be discussed, briefly and inconclusively. The last serious agreement came at San Francisco in November 2023, when Biden and Xi agreed to keep AI out of nuclear weapons systems. The Trump administration, which frames AI primarily as a strategic advantage rather than a collective risk, is unlikely to advance much. Some dialogue framework may nonetheless be agreed upon, enough for both sides to claim progress.

Eighth, the structural issues will not be discussed at all. China is building an arsenal of roughly 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035, the most rapid buildup since the early Cold War, with no successor framework to the now-expired New START treaty. Beijing continues supplying dual-use components and microelectronics that sustain Russia’s war economy in Ukraine. North Korea tests nuclear-capable weapons with alarming frequency. None of this will feature meaningfully in Beijing, because neither leader finds it convenient.

Ninth, the soybean deal will be honoured in letter and violated in spirit. Brazil supplied over eighty million metric tonnes of soybeans to China in 2025. The structural advantage is Brazilian, not American. The numbers will be announced; the deliveries are another matter entirely.

Tenth, expect more summits. This is the first of four meetings planned before the end of 2026. Xi may visit Washington in September, Trump travels to Shenzhen for APEC in November, and Xi returns for the G20 in Miami in December. Each will be swathed in the same pageantry. The summits are not endpoints. They are the mechanism by which two countries, which can neither resolve their differences nor afford to rupture them, manage the interval between crises.

Washington and Beijing have all the data. They have had it for decades. In 2006, George W Bush launched the US-China Strategic Economic Dialogue with ambitions of a genuine G2. By 2016, the Joint Committee on Commerce and Trade, established in 1983, had quietly stopped meeting. It was never formally disbanded. The two sides simply gave up.

On May 15, both men will emerge from the Great Hall of the People into the cameras. They will have talked. That, at the very least, is guaranteed.

(Aditya Sinha [X: @adityasinha004] writes on macroeconomics and geopolitics. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)