Boeing and the Trump administration said a key aviation deal was among the results of Donald Trump’s May 2026 summit with Xi Jinping, with Trump describing it as the reopening of a major customer relationship that Boeing has tried to rebuild for years. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One as he returned from Beijing on May 15, Trump said China agreed to buy 200 Boeing aircraft, calling it Boeing’s first major sale to China in nearly a decade.
Boeing confirmed the 200-plane order later on May 15, but it did not specify which aircraft models would be included or provide other deal details. In a statement, the company said it accomplished “our major goal of reopening the China market to orders for Boeing aircraft,” and added that it looked forward to “continually addressing China’s aircraft demand.”
Trump also said China reserved the right to buy as many as 750 Boeing aircraft as part of the arrangement. He said the potential aircraft deal would also benefit General Electric, which he said would supply 400 to 450 engines to China. GE Aerospace Chairman and CEO H. Lawrence Culp joined Trump on the trip, and the company did not immediately comment on the agreement.
The announcement comes as Boeing has worked to restore demand in China after U.S.-China relations soured, reducing the company’s business there. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, about a third of the narrowbody airliners Boeing delivered went to China, but Boeing’s sales in the market later plummeted, with China grounding the 737 MAX in 2019 after crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people.
Boeing’s China market did not return on the same timeline as in many other countries: Chinese airlines did not resume 737 MAX flights until January 2023. Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg took over in 2024, a year that the company faced intense scrutiny over alleged production and quality failures, including the January 2024 incident involving a 737 MAX door plug that blew off shortly after takeoff from Portland, Oregon.
On the trip to Beijing, Ortberg was among the group of American chief executives who joined Trump, seeking business opportunities in China. Ortberg previously told investors that Trump’s support on international campaigns had helped Boeing, and last month he expressed confidence that a broad U.S.-China trade agreement coming out of the Trump-Xi meetings would be a “meaningful opportunity” for the company.
The AP reporting also tied Boeing’s effort to recent high-profile airline orders in other regions involving meetings by Trump and foreign leaders. Those included a Qatar Airways order for up to 210 Boeing jets described by Boeing at the time as its largest-ever widebody order; a roughly $50 billion deal by Korean Air to buy more than 100 Boeing aircraft, spare engines and maintenance services; and announcements involving Turkish Airlines, Emirates at the Dubai Air Show, and FlyDubai.
While the deal announcement stood out amid the summit coverage, Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund, said Friday that the president’s trip ended with uncertainty about what the two sides had agreed to beyond the Boeing announcement. Glaser told a media briefing that there had been little concrete information about trade agreements from the summit, including details about Chinese purchases of U.S. exports such as soybeans, liquefied natural gas and beef, and she said, “All that we have is really what the president has told the world that China has agreed to.”