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What’s at stake for trade, Taiwan and Iran in Trump’s high-risk summit with China’s Xi

President Donald Trump is poised to meet face-to-face with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week for a much-anticipated summit in Beijing.
Trump will meet with Xi amid record-low voter popularity and as gas prices spike due to the Iran war.
Trump’s trip will be the week after Iran’s foreign minister visited Beijing and ahead of an expected meeting between Xi and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

President Donald Trump is set to meet face-to-face with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a high-stakes summit fraught with risk.

The meetings in Beijing, set for Thursday and Friday, could be a watershed moment for the adversarial superpowers, whose fragile relationship has been snarled up by a flurry of economic and political conflicts in the past year alone.

The lingering Iran war and a long-standing dispute over Taiwan are also expected to loom large over Trump and Xi’s discussions. Each of those thorny issues affects not just Washington and Beijing, but the rest of the world.

“The stakes are extraordinarily high,” said Arthur Dong, a China expert and professor of strategy and economics at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

Trump is leaning into the hype. “Great things will happen for both Countries!” he wrote in a Truth Social post Monday.

For China, however, Trump’s visit is just the latest in a series of high-profile meetings with implications for geopolitics. An Iranian official met with his Chinese counterparts in Beijing last week, and Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to visit the city days after Trump leaves.

Analysts of U.S.-China relations say they are keeping their expectations for deliverables out of the meeting low, as each side has incentives to try to thaw tensions and avoid international incidents.

Trump and Xi want to “reconfirm their relationship and have that kind of stability,” said Kyle Chan, an expert on U.S.-China relations at the Brookings Institution. “All the other stuff is gravy.”

The White House is framing the meeting in terms of trade and the U.S. economy.

Trump’s chief goal is to continue “rebalancing the relationship with China and prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told reporters Sunday.