President Donald Trump leaves Tuesday for a summit in Beijing that both Washington and Beijing want to frame as a stabilizing moment in a relationship strained by tariffs, technology competition, and the spillover of the Iran war. The meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping is expected to produce only limited concrete outcomes — likely an extension of the October trade truce and new Chinese pledges to buy U.S. soybeans, beef, and Boeing aircraft — but U.S. officials and outside analysts say the real deliverable is simply keeping both sides talking.
“Some in the Trump administration believe the outcome that matters more than any set of deliverables is stability and space for continued engagement, both to build domestic resilience and to facilitate future deal-making,” said Brett Fetterly, a managing principal at the consultancy The Asia Group. That posture reflects the broader goal of preventing a return to the escalation that saw Trump impose tariffs of 145% on Chinese goods last year before the two leaders agreed to a cease-fire during a meeting in South Korea.
Despite Trump’s repeated claims that the United States is “making a lot of money” from China — a line he used again last week — the trade data points in the opposite direction. According to U.S. Census Bureau figures, China bought nearly $50 billion less in American products last year than it did in 2022, and China’s share of U.S. goods imports has collapsed from 22% at the start of Trump’s first term in 2017 to just 7.5% in the first three months of 2026, an analysis by Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, shows. The decoupling reflects both the tariff war itself and structural shifts: China began routing exports through other Asian nations, while U.S. companies moved electronics supply chains to Vietnam and India. The United States now imports more goods from Taiwan than from China, partly because of the AI-driven demand for advanced computer chips and servers.
Central to the administration’s diplomatic push is a proposal for a permanent government-to-government Board of Trade, which U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer raised in an April 30 call with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng. The board, Greer said, could smooth disputes over goods without national-security sensitivities — agricultural products, for instance, but not computer chips — and give the administration an alternative to steep tariff increases. That option has become both logistically and legally vital: the Supreme Court ruled Trump lacked unilateral authority to impose many of last year’s tariffs, and a federal court struck down the temporary replacement tariffs just last week. The administration has since launched national-security investigations under the Trade Act of 1974 to try to build new, legally defensible tariffs tied to excess industrial capacity and efforts to bar products made with slave labor.
Traveling with Trump as part of the U.S. delegation are roughly 17 chief executives, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg, the White House said.
Beneath the talk of trade stabilization, the structural fissures are widening. China controls the majority of global rare earth mining and almost all of the processing for the minerals essential to modern electronics, a vulnerability the Trump administration is trying to address through new partnerships and investments — a multiyear undertaking. The U.S. is simultaneously working to choke off China’s access to the most advanced AI chips designed by companies like Nvidia and AMD, even as China leverages its dominance in electric vehicles: its worldwide vehicle exports rose 21% last year, and it can sell EVs far more cheaply than automakers in the U.S., Germany, Japan, or South Korea.
The Iran war has propelled those tensions in different directions for each government. “Washington and Beijing are competing at different levels and in different domains, with different theories of victory,” said Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “President Trump leveraged tariffs not as a weapon against China but as leverage to secure a trade deal. Xi Jinping is angling to win a cold war with the United States.” Ali Wyne, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, noted that the war has created an energy inflection point: the Trump administration is counting on the world’s continued reliance on oil and natural gas, while China sees the price spikes caused by disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz as an argument for a green energy transition that plays to its industrial strengths.
Early this month the U.S. imposed sanctions on a Chinese oil refinery and dozens of tankers for transporting Iranian oil, prompting Beijing to demand that no one comply with the U.S. penalties against Chinese firms. The two countries are also in a dispute over management of the Panama Canal — a bundle of irritants that, together with the larger structural clashes, means the sunny talk of a stable relationship will be tested quickly once the summit ends.