The US military honour guard has been rehearsing and the new White House helipad is ready. But will Xi Jinping and Donald Trump achieve lift-off at their summit next week?
Warnings of an AI apocalypse hang heavy over the Chinese president’s first talks at the White House with his US counterpart, with both countries racing for supremacy in this technology.
Trump’s Iran war casts a long shadow too, as China seeks to avoid US sanctions against countries dealing with Tehran, despite reports that Beijing supplied Tehran with intelligence for a strike on US troops.
A trade war is of even greater concern and the world’s two largest economies are still seeking to mitigate the fallout from Trump’s global tariffs. The threat of war over Taiwan looms large as well.
Behind it all is a desire to manage tensions between a superpower keen to keep its place at the top and a rapidly rising rival determined to make the 21st century a Chinese one.
“I’ll be discussing almost everything with him,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, ahead of their meeting on September 24.
But the two leaders are more likely to simply extend a relative truce rather than produce any concrete results, like when Xi hosted Trump in Beijing four months ago, experts said.
“I don’t expect much to come out of this,” Jonathan Czin of the Brookings Institution told AFP.
“In many ways, this is going to be a recapitulation of Trump’s visit to Beijing back in May, where the focus was really on the ostensible rapport between the two leaders.”
With fears about AI making global headlines, agreement to cooperate on regulation or a slowdown is expected to be a major topic of discussion between Trump and Xi.
But any major deals are “politically out of reach for now,” said Wang Dong, a professor at Peking University, as Beijing and Washington both fear losing out in the race for AI dominance.
Tensions over Iran will also come up. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is due to meet his Chinese counterpart He Lifeng this weekend for pre-summit talks including on Iran sanctions.
Trump has, however, played down reports that Chinese entities supplied Iran with satellite imagery for an attack on a US military base in Jordan, saying Xi had “behaved reasonably well” and that “we spy on them, too.”
On trade, there is “room for progress on tariffs, agricultural purchases and selected export controls”, Yue Su of The Economist Intelligence Unit told AFP.
The son of jailed Hong Kong pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai made an appeal to President Xi from Washington that his 78-year-old father be released.
Trump said in May that he had discussed Lai’s fate with Xi, but his release was unlikely.
But Beijing did release the founder of an underground church, Ezra Jin, after Trump raised his case with Xi.
Yet Trump has, as so often before, appeared more interested in the optics of his meeting with a powerful foreign leader than with the substance.
“This is less a summit and more a spectacle. This is designed for deep public consumption,” said Kurt Campbell, former US Deputy Secretary of State and now Chairman of The Asia Group.
Trump pushed for a new granite helicopter landing pad on the White House South Lawn to be open in time for Xi’s visit, which will include a grand state dinner.
Troops in flashy uniforms have been rehearsing on the White House driveway this week ahead of the welcome ceremony.
Trump’s only disappointment is that his under-construction $400 million ballroom won’t be ready – though he has said that when finished it will “top” Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, where Xi hosted him in May.
During the Beijing trip Trump showered praise on Xi, only for the Chinese leader to warn about possible “conflict” over Taiwan.
Fears of a possible Chinese invasion of the self-governing island and global semiconductor hub – which Beijing claims as its territory – remain the most sensitive topic between Washington and Beijing, said Peking University’s Wang.
One possible concrete deliverable is an announcement of further summits.
Trump and Xi are expected to meet in November at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Shenzhen, China. The Kremlin has suggested a three-way meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump is meanwhile expected to invite Xi to the G20 summit in December at his Doral resort in Miami.
