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Beijing: US President Donald Trump is set to arrive in Beijing on Wednesday for his highly anticipated summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, with the Iran war, trade and artificial intelligence the key talking points of their high-stakes meeting.
Trump’s state visit to China – the first by a US president in almost a decade – comes saddled with the baggage of the Iran war, which has triggered a global energy crisis, and injected fresh tensions into the talks due to Beijing’s close diplomatic ties with Tehran as the largest buyer of its oil.
Both Trump and Xi are seeking to stabilise their fragile trade truce, secured in South Korea in October, across two days of talks at the Great Hall, an evening banquet, and visits to the Temple of Heaven and Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leadership compound.
Many analysts regard the Middle East conflict as having shifted leverage further in China’s favour since the two leaders last met on the sidelines of the APEC summit last year.
As he departed Washington for Beijing on Tuesday (US time), Trump downplayed the prospect of the war hanging over the summit talks.
“I don’t think we need any help with Iran. We’ll win it one way or the other, peacefully or otherwise,” he told reporters before boarding Air Force One.
Trump is expected to seek “wins” on trade by locking in Chinese purchases of American food and aircraft, saying he’ll be talking to Xi about trade “more than anything else”.
Other US officials have indicated the Iran war will be a key agenda item, including US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who this month urged China to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
The war, launched by the US and Israel in February, has drained US military stockpiles, worsened cost-of-living pressures for Americans ahead of crucial midterm elections in November, and eroded US standing on the international stage.
“The Chinese are acutely aware that this is a major concern for the Americans, and as a result, it’s a substantial source of leverage for Beijing,” said Evan Medeiros, from the Asia Group, and a former China adviser on the Obama administration’s National Security Council.
“The question is: is Trump willing to pay whatever price Beijing puts on their Chinese co-operation on the Iran issue?”
Xi is widely expected to use the talks to emphasise China’s claims to Taiwan, and to seek to convince Trump to roll back US weapons sales to the democratic island or harden the US’s official stance towards Taiwan independence from “does not support” to “opposes”.
Trump’s visit comes days after Taiwan’s opposition-controlled parliament approved only two-thirds of a $US40 billion special defence budget to buy orders of US weapons authorised by Washington last year.
Trump has delayed signing off on another $US14 billion arms package for months, triggering speculation among analysts that it could be used as a negotiating chip.
Meanwhile, Chinese state media and officials were prefacing the US president’s arrival with strong statements about Taiwan as the most high risk “red line” in US-China relations.
“We firmly oppose the United States engaging in any form of military ties with China’s Taiwan region, and firmly oppose the United States selling weapons to China’s Taiwan region,” Zhang Han, a spokesperson for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said on Wednesday.
Accompanying Trump is a bevy of America’s top chief executives, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk and chipmaker Nvidia’s boss Jensen Huang, who was a last-minute addition to the travelling party.
He is also accompanied by family members Eric and Lara Trump and cabinet officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio. One notable name absent from the travel party is first lady Melania Trump, who is not accompanying the US president.
Her absence, first reported by the South China Morning Post, would suggest the serious nature of the visit, with pageantry giving way to hard-nosed negotiations.
The Trump administration is hoping to begin the process of establishing a “Board of Trade” with China to address differences between the countries. The board could help prevent the trade war ignited last year after Trump’s tariff rises, an action China countered through its control of rare earth minerals. That led to a one-year truce last October.
Despite Trump’s outward confidence, China appears to be entering the meeting from “a much stronger place”, said Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser on Chinese business and economics at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
China would like to reduce tech restrictions on accessing computer chips and find ways to reduce tariffs, among other goals.
“But even if they don’t get much on any of those things, as long as there’s not a blow-up in the meeting and President Trump doesn’t go away and look to re-escalate, China basically comes out stronger,” Kennedy said.
With AP
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