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By Micah McCartney
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Donald Trump's trip to Beijing this week for talks with Xi Jinping marks an opportunity for the two presidents to manage their nations' tumultuous relationship while advancing trade deals and seeking common ground on war in the Middle East.
Trump is hoping for Chinese assistance to help clinch a peace deal with Iran, and Xi is looking for an unambiguous U.S. statement opposing Taiwan independence, said Henry Wang, president of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing think tank.
The visit is "very significant," Wang told Newsweek. Images of the two leaders shaking hands at a time of multiple wars will offer assurances to the world, he said.
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This is Trump's second trip to China as U.S. president and the first by a sitting American leader in nearly nine years. Trump says he has a "great relationship" with Xi and has hailed the United States and China as the "G2," effectively elevating the status of America's top geostrategic rival to that of a near peer.
Leader-to-leader negotiations may help improve relations that have been defined by fierce competition in trade, artificial intelligence, and military buildup in the Indo-Pacific region.
Both sides have their sights set on ambitious goals that are unlikely to be met during the three-day visit, analysts say, with substantive talks planned for Thursday and symbolic events scheduled for Friday.
From Tariffs Wars to Business Deals
Just one year ago, the world’s two largest economies were engaged in an escalating trade war centered on tariffs. Under his "Liberation Day" campaign of April 2025, Trump imposed a 145-percent tax on Chinese imports to punish what he said were unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft.
China replied with a 125-percent tariff and accused the U.S. of protectionism. Crucially, it then moved to restrict U.S. access to rare earth elements, metals critical to the production of high-tech products from smartphones to missile guidance systems, and for which the U.S. has few other suppliers.
The minerals threat was enough for the two sides to launch unofficial trade talks and, by October, a one-year truce was struck on the sidelines of the APEC summit in South Korea.
The White House this week promised Trump would “deliver more good deals” for the U.S., with deputy press secretary Anna Kelly saying agriculture, aerospace and energy would be areas of focus. As he heads to Beijing, however, Trump's hand on trade is also notably weakened by U.S. court rulings this year that found many of his tariffs were an illegal use of executive power.
The bosses of Boeing and grains producer Cargill will be joining tech executives like Elon Musk and Tim Cook picked for the delegation flying over with Trump, who may play up China's previous pledge in Busan to buy 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans and its agreement to purchase at least 25 million metric tons annually from 2026-2028.
But any handful of deals would be modest, limited to tens of billions of dollars, a senior U.S. official told reporters during a recent press call. And while there might be deals on beef and grain, the summit is unlikely to produce a breakthrough on the major arenas of competition where both sides are increasingly entrenched, analysts say.
In strategic sectors such as AI and emerging tech—where the real money is—neither Washington or Beijing will relinquish what advantage they each have. The U.S. has tightened controls on advanced chips and outbound investment, while Beijing also seeks to keep sensitive technology and talent from ending up in U.S. hands.
Last month, China blocked Meta’s acquisition of a Chinese startup’s AI agent, in the clearest sign yet that tech supremacy had become a core national security imperative on both sides of the Pacific.
China isn't waiting around for the next trade deal with America—it has branched out into new markets and quietly enacted measures to restrict the export of its most important technologies and renewable energy to the United States.
"The best Donald Trump can reasonably hope for while in Beijing this week is some kind of movement back toward where things were before Liberation Day,” Sean King, senior vice president at the Park Strategies consultancy in New York, told Newsweek.
Xi might offer Chinese investments in the U.S., King said, but those would carry risks such as Beijing-directed intellectual property theft, “considering Chinese companies are required by law to answer to the government in Beijing."'
'Winning' the Iran War
Trump has already revealed China's behind-the-scenes role in the April 7 ceasefire that paused the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. This week, Trump likely will seek further help from Tehran's most important backer to end the conflict on terms favorable not only to the U.S., but also China.
Beijing has demonstrated a certain readiness to intervene in affairs in the Middle East, even if only from afar, by sending public messages of support for Tehran's leaders while also repeating calls for the safe reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which has been shut by Iran's Revolutionary Guard for nearly three months.
Rare direct comments by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi, and subsequent statements by Xi himself, suggest China and the U.S. aren't as far apart on the principle of free movement of goods in the strait as would first appear.
Both Beijing and Washington are hoping for a de-escalation on Iran, while Trump has likely realized he cannot bomb Iran into submission, Ali Wyne, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group, said at a panel discussion last week.
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The five-point peace plan jointly announced by China and Pakistan and Xi's four-point initiative both were signs of Beijing's cautious approach to mediating a war that has put more than 40 percent of its oil imports at risk.
China's strategic fuel stockpiles have helped it ride out the war in the Middle East, although it won't remain immune forever. The rising superpower has deep interests beyond cheap Iranian oil, to include the possible strain its political and ideological support for Iran might place on its relations with major trading partners around the Persian Gulf.
Trump himself will have one eye on the midterm elections back home, where gas prices are rising as Iran holds out against the weeks-long U.S. naval blockade. He said on Tuesday that the U.S. didn't need China's help to secure a peace deal, days after rejecting an Iranian proposal he called "totally unacceptable."
China could quietly offer to bring more of its influence to bear on Iran's new hardline leadership, but any off-ramp for Trump likely would require its own concessions.
"Beijing is more likely to wait out the conflict than spend diplomatic capital trying to solve it. For Beijing, the bigger prize is stabilizing the broader U.S.-China relationship. Turning the Iran war into a major point of confrontation would not serve that goal," said Heidi Crebo-Rediker, a senior fellow in the Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"The key question is not whether Iran is discussed, but whether Trump is willing to give China language it wants on Taiwan," Crebo-Rediker told Newsweek.
What China Wants—Taiwan
Beijing pressed former President Joe Biden to change U.S. policy on Taiwan and will do so again when Xi hosts Trump. The democratically governed island—a top U.S. trade partner and world leader in chipmaking—has for decades been claimed by China as part of its territory.
In 1979, the U.S. cut formal ties with Taipei in favor of Beijing, but the U.S. has maintained robust economic and security ties with the island's government, which sources most of its arms from America. Recently, Taiwan has found itself in the middle of a great power rivalry between the U.S. and China, with a president in the White House whose transactional diplomacy is also unpredictable.
The U.S. officially takes no position on sovereignty over Taiwan and longstanding U.S. policy has been not to support the island's political independence. A senior U.S. official told reporters this week that there would be no change in U.S. policy on Taiwan, but Beijing has never been in a stronger position to assert its core demand—that Washington formally oppose Taiwan independence in its policy language.
Longtime China watchers believe Trump has already broken with decades of U.S. policy since the 1980s by suggesting the future and nature of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan could be up for discussion with Xi, adding to concerns on Capitol Hill that previously approved weapons deals could be delayed and the $31 billion arms backlog increased.
Biden also broke with U.S. policy language multiple times, first by openly committing U.S. forces to the possible defense of Taiwan, then by claiming the U.S. was treaty-bound to do so.
The situation over Taiwan remains "extremely dangerous," said Lyle Goldstein, who is head of the Asia Program at the Defense Priorities think tank in Washington, D.C., and director of the China Initiative at Brown University.
China's rapid military buildup has already moved the needle in its favor if the U.S. and China ever come to blows over Taiwan, Goldstein told Newsweek, adding that further weapons sales should be on the table in the interest of peace.
"Arms sales have been on the agenda since the third communiqué in the 1980s,” he said, referring to a 1982 agreement in which the U.S. pledged to gradually reduce the arms sale. The communique did not designate a timeline and was contingent on China's pursuit of a peaceful resolution to the dispute with Taiwan.
“I do think it's a legitimate area to discuss, and Trump, again, probably upset the apple cart in Washington when he said he was thinking this over," Goldstein said.
One "logical place to draw the line" might be weapons systems such as the Army Tactical Missile System, supersonic missiles capable of reaching coastal targets in southeast China, he said. The December arms package approved by Washington included 400 of these missiles.
Low-Hanging Fruit
Xi was unlikely to have agreed to Trump’s visit without the knowledge that some promises could be delivered, even if that’s an updated trade deal.
In the meantime, there are opportunities for easier-to-achieve diplomatic wins, such as the proposed investment and trade boards and U.S. dropping a 10-percent tariff imposed last year over the deadly opioid Fentanyl, in light of Beijing's crackdown on manufacturers of ingredients to the deadly opioid.
Other deliverables could be reopening the Chinese consulates in Houston and Texas and the U.S. consulate in Chengdu in southwestern Sichuan province, said Wang, the Beijing researcher.
China could offer 30 days of visa-free travel to American citizens, bringing the U.S. in line with China's visa policy for other Group of Seven nations, he said.
Kerry Brown, a professor of Chinese studies who leads the Lau China Institute at King's College London, said at a recent event: “I don't think that China in any way looks down America. It knows America is massively important.”
“And I think they are probably not super happy with the amount of instability that we have in Washington. I don't think that they like that at all,” Brown said.
Update 5/13/26 9:59 a.m. This article has been updated with additional information.
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