U.S. President Donald Trump made his long awaited trip to China this week, arriving in the country on May 13 and holding a bilateral meeting, as well as a state banquet, with China’s Xi Jinping on May 14. He will have tea and lunch with Xi on May 15 before departing for Washington. Trump’s visit marked the first by a U.S. president to China since 2017 – during Trump’s first term.
From Beijing, Trump and Xi promised a new era for the bilateral relationship. Xi even presented an entirely new formula: “building a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability.” According to the readout from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that means “positive stability with cooperation as the mainstay, healthy stability with competition within proper limits, constant stability with manageable differences, and lasting stability with expectable peace.”
Appealing to Trump’s desire to carve out a place for himself in the history books, Xi expressed interest in working with Trump to “make 2026 a historic, landmark year that opens up a new chapter in China-U.S. relations.”
Trump put it in simpler terms: “The relationship between China and the USA is going to be better than ever before.”
While Xi seemed intent on addressing the broad strokes of the relationship, Trump’s focus was narrower: trade and economic cooperation. Trump was accompanied by a bevy of CEOs from top American companies, including Apple, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Meta, Nvidia, Tesla, and Qualcomm. In a post on Truth Social before he landed in China, Trump said his “very first request” to Xi would be for China to “open up” to American companies represented by the CEOs.
During the summit, Trump even paraded the CEOs before Xi and had them introduce themselves. He said that the business leaders were there to “pay their respects to you [Xi] and to China.”
Several of these companies – particularly Nvidia and Qualcomm – are central to the China-U.S. competition in semiconductors and artificial intelligence. In fact, the U.S. government itself has put restrictions on their ability to sell cutting-edge technology to China. But there was no mention of those tensions during the meeting.
In fact, some of the U.S. talking points during the visit were oddly reminiscent of an earlier, simpler time in China-U.S. relations, when Washington still had hopes for fair market access and an appetite for large-scale Chinese investment. In a statement posted on Facebook, the White House said that Trump and Xi “discussed ways to enhance economic cooperation between our two countries, including expanding market access for American businesses into China and increasing Chinese investment into our industries.” That sentence would have fit right in during the Clinton and Bush administrations.
More recently, Chinese investment began to be a point of contention, with many U.S. policymakers viewing Chinese funds with skepticism and seeking to wall off sensitive sectors from Chinese involvement. It’s been a long time since a U.S. president openly called for “increasing Chinese investment.”
For all the focus on trade on the U.S. side, it wasn’t clear what Washington gained. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng held final preparatory talks on trade outcomes in South Korea on May 13. The specific outcomes of those talks, and the summit discussions, were not available as of writing. Instead, there was a vague mention of Chinese “interest in purchasing more American oil,” and Trump pushed for increased purchases of U.S. agricultural goods. Neither topic appeared in the Chinese readout, nor did cooperation on stemming flows of fentanyl – another U.S. priority.
China’s only mention of trade outcomes was to praise the “generally balanced and positive outcomes” of the Bessent-He talks, without elaborating on what, exactly, those outcomes were.
Rather than trade deals, Xi focused on the broad stokes of the relationship, hoping to set a tone of stable competition between equals. But he did have a warning for Trump on Taiwan: “The U.S. side must exercise extra caution in handling the Taiwan question… Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy.”
Xi emphasized that “the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U.S. relations,” a position Beijing has held since before normalization. Back in 1971, China’s leaders wouldn’t even agree to talk to Henry Kissinger until given assurances on Taiwan, and the bulk of those early conversations dealt with the U.S. stance on Taiwan.
Trump, however, seemed to simply ignore Xi’s comments on Taiwan. He didn’t mention the issue himself, but “moved on to the next topic without acknowledging” Xi’s remarks, the Washington Post reported, citing an anonymous White House official.
On other geopolitical flashpoints, China’s readout said Trump and Xi discussed “the Middle East situation” (a polite euphemism for the conflict in the Gulf stemming from Israeli-U.S. strikes on Iran), “the Ukraine crisis” (another euphemism for Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, now in its fifth year), and “the Korean Peninsula” (meaning North Korea’s rapidly expanding nuclear program and ongoing security tensions with the South). China offered no specifics on any of these areas.
The White House statements didn’t mention Ukraine or North Korea, but did go into some detail on the Middle East. “Both countries agreed that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon,” the White House said in a Facebook post. It also said, “The two sides agreed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open to support the free flow of energy.”
Last week, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi had conveyed a similar message to visiting Iranian Foreign Minister Seyyed Abbas Araghchi, saying “the international community shares a common concern about restoring normal and safe passage through the strait.” However, Wang also assured Araghchi that “China supports Iran in safeguarding its national sovereignty and security” – a position that didn’t make it into the White House summary.
According to the White House, “President Xi also made clear China’s opposition to the militarization of the Strait and any effort to charge a toll for its use.” Given the massive volume of China’s external trade, Beijing adamantly does not want to establish a precedent for littoral states to restrict the flow of shipping through nearby waterways.
On May 14, the same day as the Trump-Xi summit, Iran said the Strait of Hormuz was, in fact, open – as long as ships transiting it cooperated with the Iranian navy.
If the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz was linked to the Trump-Xi meeting – and if it lasts – it’s by far the biggest deliverable from the talks. Otherwise, the main takeaway is simply that the summit happened at all. It’s been nearly a decade since a U.S. president last visited China. As U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News while en route to Beijing, the summit was a success simply “because we’re going, and we’re going to be able to talk to them as opposed to at them.”
The White House called it a “good meeting,” and Trump was typically effusive. He repeatedly called Xi a “great leader” and said that he and the Chinese leader have “a fantastic relationship, whenever there were difficulties we would work it out.”
“It’s an honor to be your friend, and the relationship between China and the USA is going to be better than ever before,” Trump said to Xi at the conclusion of his prepared remarks before the summit proper began.
Rubio was a bit less optimistic. He noted that China remains the United State’s “top political challenge geopolitically.”
“We’re going to have interests of ours that are going to be in conflict with interests of theirs, and to avoid wars and maintain peace and stability in the world we’re going to have to manage those,” Rubio continued. That seems to have been Xi’s main theme in the talks as well.
Rubio’s presence in China was especially interesting, as he is technically barred from entering the country. In 2020, then-Senator Rubio was banned from entering China and placed under unspecified sanctions for his support for the Uyghur people and Hong Kong. China found a workaround by simply changing the Chinese characters used to refer to Rubio – effectively giving him a new name in Chinese that was not on the entry ban list.
The serious human rights concerns that Rubio had previously spoken out about were totally absent from the agenda this time.
