When Xi Jinping touches down in Maryland on Wednesday for his first US state visit since 2015, he will find a counterpart unusually eager for bonhomie. Donald Trump has signalled a warmth toward the Chinese leader unmatched by recent predecessors, even musing publicly about a hug. Yet beneath the choreographed cordiality lies a relationship defined by deep structural distrust. The second face-to-face summit this year — following May’s Beijing meeting — arrives with expectations deliberately tamped down. “Nobody is using the term ‘deliverables’,” says Bonnie Glaser of the German Marshall Fund. What emerges instead is a narrow window for cooperation on artificial intelligence safety, even as trade tensions, Taiwan arms sales, and divergent geopolitical visions threaten to stall any substantive progress.
The AI Opening
The most tangible agenda item sits at the intersection of technology and national security. Thursday’s White House state dinner reads like a Silicon Valley roll call: Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jensen Huang will break bread with the two presidents. Their presence underscores the stakes. Trump has framed the AI race in stark, zero-sum terms. “We’re leading China in AI,” he declared recently. “And frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins.”
That rhetoric has unsettled allies and adversaries alike. In recent weeks, Washington has wrestled with competing impulses: the desire to accelerate domestic innovation versus mounting warnings that frontier models are outpacing safety frameworks. Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, attempted to thread the needle on Sunday, proposing an AI safety mechanism to his counterpart, Vice-Premier He Lifeng, during talks in Paris. The proposal stops well short of a binding agreement. It is, at best, a framework for dialogue.
Beijing’s response has been cautious. The People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, called for making AI “a new frontier for China-US cooperation” and endorsed the “intergovernmental dialogue mechanism.” António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, went further, urging a cold war-style hotline between the two AI superpowers. “Governments with the greatest AI capabilities have the greatest responsibilities to humanity,” he said.
China, however, rejects the premise that its AI trajectory poses an existential threat. The foreign ministry dismissed calls from Anthropic chief Dario Amodei to impede Beijing’s progress as “fearmongering.” Beijing has already moved unilaterally on labelling AI-generated content, restricting child access to AI companions, and tightening chatbot controls — measures driven as much by domestic information control as by safety. Amanda Hsiao of the Eurasia Group captures the core friction: “The Chinese are inclined to think of every US call for safety standards as a means of suppressing Chinese development.”
Trade Truce on Borrowed Time
If AI offers a sliver of common ground, trade remains a minefield. The fragile ceasefire struck at last year’s South Korea summit — a tariff pause coupled with Chinese concessions on rare earth exports — expires in November. Beijing wants a permanent tariff removal to shield its export-dependent economy. Washington, by contrast, views the truce as leverage. “The US side views this as leverage over China and ensuring that they can get deliveries of the rare earths and magnets that American companies need,” Glaser notes.
China’s negotiating hand is stronger than it appears. Despite years of tariffs and export controls, Chinese exports have surged. The country is on track for a second consecutive $1 trillion trade surplus. That resilience reduces the urgency for concessions. Meanwhile, US semiconductor restrictions have bitten — China remains cut off from the most advanced chips needed for AI training — but Beijing has responded with a whole-of-state push for self-sufficiency. The humanoid robot ban this year was merely the latest salvo.
Taiwan: The Negotiating Chip
The most consequential shift since May concerns Taiwan. In Beijing, Trump agreed to pause a $14 billion arms package — a departure from decades of precedent insulating Taiwan weapons sales from the broader bilateral relationship. Trump has since described future sales as a “very good negotiating chip.” Reports suggest further delays until after the APEC and G20 summits later this year, where the two leaders will meet again.
For Beijing, this is validation of its pressure campaign. For Washington’s allies in the Indo-Pacific, it is alarming. Senator Tammy Duckworth, speaking at the Center for American Progress, warned that Trump “violated our longstanding position on Taiwan by engaging in discussions on arms sales to Taiwan with President Xi.” She added: “I worry that it’s going to be a repeat of that and President Trump basically spends too much time sucking up to President Xi.”
Duckworth’s skepticism is grounded in recent history. The May summit yielded promises of 200 Boeing aircraft and $17 billion in agricultural purchases. Neither materialised.
Geopolitical Fault Lines
Beyond the bilateral agenda, the summit unfolds against a backdrop of diverging world orders. China is Iran’s largest oil buyer and a critical economic lifeline. After US strikes on Iran in February, Beijing quietly pressured Tehran toward negotiations and slashed oil imports by nearly a quarter in the first half of the year — a move that helped contain global inflation. Da Wei of Tsinghua University called it evidence of “a more confident China” that “did not exploit the difficulties that the United States faced.”
Yet on Ukraine, Beijing has remained steadfast alongside Moscow since the 2022 invasion. Bessent’s recent declaration of an “economic D-Day” against Iran and its enablers included claims of “very good private discussions” with Chinese officials on cutting economic ties. Beijing’s public posture suggests otherwise.
Ali Wyne of the International Crisis Group frames the contrast sharply: “While the former is mired once more in the Middle East and straining longstanding alliances, the latter is casting itself as a stabilising counterweight and the leading champion of a more multipolar order.” Scott Kennedy of CSIS puts it more bluntly: “This is not a G2. They are finding a way to manage the bilateral relationship, but they are not whatsoever working together as co-stewards of the international order.”
High Vibes, Low Ambition
The prevailing view among analysts is one of managed expectations. “It is going to be yet another summit that is high on positive vibes and relatively low ambition in terms of substance,” Hsiao predicts. The optics will be warm — the Forbidden City tour of 2017 may find its Maryland equivalent — but the structural contradictions remain. Trade leverage, technology containment, Taiwan’s status, and competing visions for global order cannot be resolved over a state dinner.
Democrats are already sounding alarms. Duckworth’s warning that Trump is “very distracted” and prone to “cosying up to an authoritarian regime at the expense of our friends and allies” reflects a broader anxiety that the president’s personal diplomacy may outpace his administration’s strategic coherence.
Why it Matters
This summit will not produce a grand bargain, but it will calibrate the guardrails for the world’s most consequential bilateral relationship. The AI safety mechanism — however modest — establishes a precedent for dialogue on a technology that will define economic and military power for decades. The trade truce’s fate will signal whether decoupling accelerates or stabilises. Most critically, the Taiwan arms sale pause reveals a US president willing to trade long-standing commitments for transactional gain, a signal watched closely in Taipei, Tokyo, and Seoul. In an era of multipolar fragmentation, how Washington and Beijing manage their rivalry — not whether they resolve it — will shape the global order more than any joint communiqué.