Trump and Xi meet in Beijing for key summit, with trade, Iran and AI on table | China
US president Donald Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping for a major summit that will fit negotiations on global conflicts, international trade and the future of artificial intelligence into just over 24 hours.
Trump arrived at the Great Hall of the People, an imposing Mao-era building on the western edge of Tiananmen Square, for the inauguration ceremony on Thursday morning and then met face-to-face with Xi for an hour.
As rows of uniformed officers lined either side of a red carpet laid out in front of the Great Hall of the People, Xi and Trump walked side by side to the podium to hear a welcome salute before being applauded by primary school children waving US and Chinese flags. The kids got a double thumbs up from Trump and a wave from Xi.
The ceremony ended with a tightly choreographed performance by the Chinese military marching band, before Trump and Xi walked up the stairs to China’s national legislature for the first round of bilateral talks.
In his opening speech, Xi stated that 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the independence of the United States and said that stability in US-China relations is necessary for the world.
Trump said he and Xi “have known each other for a long time” and that Xi is a “great leader.” Trump told Xi: “I tell everyone that you are a great leader. Sometimes people don’t like it when I say it, but I say it anyway because it’s true.”
The Chinese government said the two leaders discussed the war in the Middle East, the Ukrainian conflict and problems on the Korean peninsula during the two-hour talks.
According to the statement made by the Chinese foreign ministry, Xi told Trump that the Taiwan issue is “the most important issue in China-US relations.” Xi warned that if the issue is not handled properly, “conflicts and even clashes” could occur between the two countries. The language underscores the rhetoric used by Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in a recent phone call with U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio.
Trump’s February attack on Iran, assassinating the leadership of a country with close ties to China and endangering global energy supplies cast a shadow over talks that were supposed to focus on reaching a trade deal between the world’s two largest economies.
Rubio said on Air Force One as the Trump team was en route to Beijing that the United States would pressure Beijing for help in the Iran crisis. “We hope to persuade them to play a more active role.” Ensuring Iran moves away “We’re starting from what they’re doing and trying to do in the Persian Gulf right now,” he told Fox News.[China] “It is both our biggest political problem geopolitically and the most important relationship for us to manage.”
Beijing hopes to use the meeting to recalibrate U.S.-China relations and lay the foundation for a stable and optimistically predictable trade relationship going forward.
“In the environment of increasing international instability, the strategic importance of China-US relations becomes even more prominent,” Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng said in an op-ed published in the CCP’s official newspaper on Thursday.
Xie said no interaction between the two superpowers was “not an option.”
It is unclear what concrete results will be achieved in this week’s talks. The Trump administration has been talking about establishing a “trade board” with China to resolve trade differences between the countries. Beijing wants to force Trump to soften U.S. support for Taiwan by changing the rhetoric or reducing arms sales to the self-governing island, but many in Beijing concede that is unlikely.
Although the visit lasts only two days, Xi and Trump will have plenty of time to interact during the visit, the first of four presidential meetings expected this year. In the afternoon, the two leaders will tour the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, a religious complex of the Ming dynasty that was also visited by Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford.
During his first visit in 2017, Trump became the first foreign leader in modern Chinese history to be invited to dine at the Forbidden City, the vast palace complex that hosted Chinese emperors for hundreds of years.
There are other differences from the 2017 state visit. This year, Beijing appears to have done less to ensure blue skies ahead of Trump’s arrival.
In 2017, in the days before Trump’s visit nearly a decade ago, factories were ordered to halt production and heavily polluting cars were banned from the roads; During this period, China declared war on air pollution and made special efforts to clean the skies ahead of visiting dignitaries and important political events such as the Beijing Olympics.
No such effort was made this year. The air quality index in the capital is over 150 today, well above the World Health Organization’s healthy air guidelines, shrouding the city in a grayish smog full of pollutants harmful to human health.
China’s fight against air pollution has slowed in recent years. This is partly because huge improvements have already been made: last year’s average levels of PM2.5, the most harmful particle in air pollution, in Beijing fell below 30 for the first time since records began more than a decade ago.
But overly polluted skies remain a fairly common occurrence. And the visit of the US president is no longer a reason to exonerate them.
Additional research by Yu-chen Li
