BEIJING — President Donald Trump came into office 16 months ago promising to take a hard line against Chinese trade policies that he said were stealing jobs and opportunities from Americans. But as he embarks this week on his first visit to Beijing in nearly a decade, he isn’t coming seeking a fight.
Instead, Trump, who is scheduled to arrive Wednesday evening in Beijing, appears ready to revel in the grandeur of a state visit with the strongman leader of one of the most populous countries in the world, as centuries-old monuments, including the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City, are thrown open for his visiting pleasure.
“We’re going to be talking with President Xi [Jinping] about a lot of different things. I would say more than anything else will be trade,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday before leaving Washington.
“We’re the strongest nation on Earth in terms of military. China’s considered second, who knows,” he said. “I have a great relationship with President Xi, and I think it’s going to remain that way. We have a lot of things to discuss.”
The trip comes as each side seeks to manage its most consequential relationship, in a moment when Trump is struggling politically because of his decision to attack Iran in February. The war has sent energy prices soaring, weighing down the U.S. economy with no end in sight. It has infuriated many of the president’s supporters, who say they voted for a leader who would get the cost of living under control, not one who would make them wince every time they fill their gas tanks.
Those factors have combined to limit the administration’s ambitions for the two-day China trip.
Top lieutenants say they want to hold onto a fragile truce that has kept Chinese rare earth ores flowing to the United States in exchange for Trump’s backing away from his highest tariffs.
Chinese officials have said they plan to press Trump on the status of Taiwan, the island territory that the U.S. supplies with weaponry but whose independence it does not recognize.
Trump, searching for trade deals, or at least the promise of future ones, may try to downplay the defense of Taiwan in his conversations with the Chinese leader. Already, Pentagon planners who once discussed how to stockpile weaponry in case they needed to defend Taiwan against a Chinese incursion have cooled their rhetoric. And Trump has opened the door to a halt to arms sales to Taiwan that would delight Beijing — a prospect that has alarmed some of the island’s backers.
Taiwan for generations has been among the defining elements of the uneasy security discussion between the United States and China, and the likeliest spark for a war between the two countries. But Trump indicated that he may be open to rethinking how Washington handles relations with the island.
“We’re 9,500 miles” from Taiwan, Trump told reporters at a White House event Monday. “He’s 67 miles. It’s a little bit of a difference.”
Asked whether the United States should still be selling weaponry to Taiwan, Trump said that “President Xi would like us not to, and I’ll have that discussion. That’s one of the many things I’ll be talking about.”
In addition to Taiwan and trade, the war on Iran, artificial intelligence and the illegal trade in fentanyl are almost certain to be topics of discussion.
But with both sides increasingly consumed by domestic politics, neither for now appears to have the appetite to hammer out a vast reimagining of their relationship.
“If I scroll back to the middle of last year, I think both the Chinese side and the U.S. side had much grander ambitions for a grand bargain, a fundamental reset of the relationship, and the experience of the last year has really caused both sides to readjust,” said Sarah Beran, who served in the first months of Trump’s second administration as the top U.S. diplomat in China and also worked on China issues during the Biden and first Trump administrations.
“The difficulties, the frictions, aren’t going away between the two, but both sides also really are focused on domestic issues. And so the interest and appetite for real work on a foreign policy issue set like this has, I’d say, decreased a bit,” said Beran, who is now at Macro Advisory Partners, an international consulting group.
During his first term, Trump was largely focused on eliminating the trade deficit between China and the United States, evolving to a harder-line focus on security and confrontation only in his final year in office, as the coronavirus pandemic paralyzed the world.
The second term has been more focused again on trade, with China taking only a minor role in the National Security Strategy that was unveiled late last year.
The war on Iran has also consumed so many U.S. munitions that officials, including Vice President JD Vance, have said they have raised questions about military readiness, should the United States want to intervene in a war in East Asia.
China has backed Iran and has long bought Iranian oil. But it also was a party to the 2015 agreement that placed strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program. A senior Trump administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss planning for the event, said that “I would expect the president to apply pressure” on Beijing’s support for Tehran.
Despite restrained expectations for the summit, officials say that when two leaders have gathered so much decision-making authority around themselves, it is still productive to get them together in a room.
Unlike Trump’s first term, when a broader cadre of U.S. policymakers was empowered to set policy at a lower level and manage the relationship, this time everything flows down from the Oval Office, officials say.
“The president has set a very clear vision, or clear direction, but there’s less guidance day-to-day. And so it becomes very hard for people below, frankly, the president to take action or push things forward,” Beran said.
The leaders may agree to a council to discuss issues around artificial intelligence, which continues to make rapid advances and increasingly is interwoven with national security. Trump, like former president Joe Biden before him, is also expected to pressure Xi to crack down on the export of the precursors of fentanyl.
Within the administration, policymakers committed to fostering a smooth economic relationship with Beijing appear to have the upper hand over those who sought a more confrontational approach, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, doing much of the summit planning, two officials familiar with the arrangement said.
With the focus on boosting trade and Trump’s declaration that he is willing to talk to Xi about the future of Taiwan, some U.S. policymakers are getting alarmed that decades of U.S. support for Taipei may be at risk.
White House officials dismiss that concern, saying the Trump administration has already sold Taiwan more weapons than the Biden administration did, although many of the orders have not yet been delivered. One senior White House official said there was no expectation of a policy change on Taiwan during the visit.
But some hawkish Republicans in Congress say they want Trump to push back.
“Why would we tap the brakes when China’s kind of flexing?” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) at a briefing for reporters on Monday. “The way you respond to a China flex is with a flex.”
He said he hoped Trump would tell Xi to cut off support for U.S. challengers in Moscow and Tehran.
“China needs to stop being a personal trainer for our adversaries,” Tillis said. “That’s what I would tell China.”
Trump and Xi last year declared an ambition to meet four times in 2026, more frequently than in recent years and a signal of their hopes to reach a broader understanding with each other. Xi and his wife are due next in the United States.
But even those who favor reimagining the trade relationship say that this week is unlikely to yield a breakthrough.
“China is challenging America’s global leadership, but that’s more long term,” said Piero Tozzi, the senior director for China policy at the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-friendly policy think tank.
“President Trump obviously is very concerned about the midterms and doesn’t want to boil the economy any more than it has been in the wake of Iran. But also for his part, Xi Jinping wants to have a stable, positive outcome,” Tozzi said. “It’s a pause. It gives both battered pugilists a chance to catch their breath until the bell next sounds.”
Isaac Arnsdorf and Emily Davies in Washington contributed to this report.
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