President Donald Trump landed in Beijing on Wednesday evening, beginning a high-stakes visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping that both governments have cast as an effort to steady a relationship strained by the war in Iran, escalating trade friction, and U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. Trump was greeted on the tarmac by Chinese Vice President Han Zheng, Ambassador to Washington Xie Feng, and Executive Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu, along with U.S. Ambassador David Perdue and a welcoming ceremony of roughly 300 young Chinese, a military honor guard, and a military band.
“We are the two superpowers,” Trump told reporters before departing Washington on Tuesday. “We are the strongest nation on the planet militarily. China is considered to be the second.”
The centerpiece of the summit — bilateral talks and a formal banquet — is scheduled for Thursday. But Trump is already framing the trip as a success, openly discussing a reciprocal visit by Xi to the United States later this year and lamenting that the White House ballroom under renovation would not be ready to host the Chinese leader properly.
The president traveled aboard Air Force One with a delegation of family members, senior advisers, and business titans that includes Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. While en route, Trump posted on social media that his “first request” of Xi would be to “open China” to greater American business presence.
Yet the backdrop of the visit is anything but triumphal. The war against Iran, now in its second year, has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, stranding tankers loaded with oil and natural gas and pushing energy prices to levels economists warn could choke global growth. Trump insisted on Tuesday that Xi did not need to help resolve the conflict. “I wouldn’t say Iran is one of the topics, to be honest, because we have Iran very under control,” he told reporters. But Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was in Beijing just last week, underscoring China’s potential leverage.
At home, the war’s inflationary drag has weighed on Trump’s poll numbers. The president is eager to return with tangible economic wins, and he said he would discuss trade “more than anything else.” The White House wants to initiate a “Trade Board” with China — a standing body to manage disputes before they trigger the kind of escalatory cycle that erupted last year when Trump’s tariffs prompted Beijing to restrict rare-earth exports. That confrontation ended in a one-year truce last October.
Taiwan is expected to be an even more combustible subject. Trump said Monday he plans to raise the $11 billion weapons package the U.S. authorized for the self-governing island in December — the largest ever approved — but which has not yet been delivered. The package has infuriated Beijing, which claims Taiwan as its own territory. The Chinese Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily ran an editorial ahead of Trump’s arrival calling Taiwan “the first red line that cannot be crossed in China-U.S. relations” and “the greatest point of risk” between the two nations.
Trump has shown increasing ambivalence toward Taiwan, raising questions among allies and analysts about whether he might reduce support for the island democracy. The calculus is complicated by Taiwan’s role as the world’s leading chip manufacturer, essential to artificial-intelligence development, and by the fact that the United States has imported more goods from Taiwan than from China so far this year.
Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser on Chinese business and economics at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said China arrives at the summit from “a much stronger position” than the United States. Beijing wants reduced technology restrictions on computer chips and lower tariffs, among other objectives. “But even if they don’t get much on any of those issues, as long as there’s no blow-up at the meeting and President Trump doesn’t leave and look to escalate again, China basically comes out stronger,” Kennedy said.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng met Wednesday at Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, to discuss economic and commercial matters, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported — an early signal that both sides are working to keep diplomatic channels open ahead of Thursday’s main event.
Trump also intends to propose a trilateral nuclear-arms pact among the United States, China, and Russia, a senior administration official told reporters before the trip, speaking on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House. China has previously resisted such a framework; the Pentagon estimates Beijing’s arsenal at more than 600 operational warheads, with more than 1,000 projected by 2030. Both the U.S. and Russia are estimated to hold more than 5,000 warheads apiece. The last bilateral U.S.-Russia arms treaty, New START, expired in February, removing for the first time in more than half a century any caps on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. When the treaty was nearing expiration, Trump rejected a Russian call to extend it by one year and demanded a “new, improved, and modernized” agreement that includes China.