Both leaders are likely to try maintaining the status quo rather than reset relations Read more at The Business Times.
Source: The Business Times
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The Xi-Trump Summit: A Maintenance Check, Not a Reset
By Leon Hadar
When President Trump welcomes Xi Jinping to Washington on September 24, it will mark the second meeting between the two leaders this yea, a rare pace of summitry for a relationship more often defined by tension than dialogue.
The visit follows Trump's state trip to Beijing in May, and it comes roughly a year after their October 2025 meeting in Busan, South Korea. Taken together, the two capitals appear to be testing whether high-level, repeated contact can substitute for the deeper structural fixes that have eluded them for a decade.
What's actually on the table
The Washington summit arrives with modest ambitions. Both governments describe the relationship as broadly stable in recent months and say they intend to keep it that way, though the underlying list of disputes remains long, from technology competition to the unresolved question of Taiwan. Once both sides agree that stability itself is the goal, the harder question of what comes next gets considerably murkier, which is why the expectation is that the summit would produce very little in the way of new agreements.
Trade remains the most tangible thread connecting the two summits. May's meeting in Beijing yielded talk of "constructive strategic stability," a shared position against Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, new Chinese purchases of American airline and agricultural goods, and plans for a joint U.S.-China Board of Trade and Board of Investment.
The Heritage Foundation frames the coming meeting less as a breakthrough opportunity than as a check on whether Beijing has actually followed through on those Beijing-summit commitments, a useful lens for judging September's outcome. Agricultural purchases in particular have become a barometer: the May summit ended with a pledge to restore U.S.-China agricultural trade to pre-2025 levels, if fulfilled, and that conditional clause is doing a lot of work. See Xi Comes to Washington: Expectations for the Trump–Xi Summit | The Heritage Foundation +2
Taiwan sits closer to the center of the conversation than either side likes to admit publicly. At the May summit, Xi reportedly told Trump that the Taiwan question is the single most important issue in the relationship, warning that mishandling it risks tipping the two countries into confrontation. Trump did not respond publicly to those remarks at the time, and the American readout instead emphasized trade and Iran, a pattern of talking past each other on the island that is likely to recur in Washington. Layered onto that is the perennial friction over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, which China treats as a red line regardless of the broader diplomatic mood. See Trump-Xi summit triggers Taiwan, trade debate: Report +2
Technology and artificial intelligence give the summit its more forward-looking edge. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has confirmed that AI will be on the agenda, reflecting how the AI race has become inseparable from the broader competition over semiconductors and export controls that has simmered since the first Trump term. CSIS analysts have been blunter, arguing that the Beijing summit exposed how little real progress has been made on the toughest dimensions of the rivalry, AI, cybersecurity, and related fields, a gap September's talks are unlikely to close. See CNBCCenter for Strategic and International Studies
Iran adds an unusual variable. Beijing has positioned itself as an unofficial mediator in the war, and ending that conflict is expected to be folded into the summit's agenda, even as the Trump administration simultaneously rolls out secondary sanctions targeting Iran's "enablers," a policy that inevitably touches Chinese firms and complicates the message of cooperation. See aawsatCNBC
The politics surrounding the summit
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The meeting lands less than six weeks before the U.S. midterm elections, with polls showing Democrats favored to make gains in Congress, a backdrop that gives Trump incentive to walk away with visible deliverables, even modest ones, on trade and farm purchases. The timing also overlaps with the UN General Assembly's high-level week; Trump is set to address the Assembly on September 22 and typically stays in New York for several days afterward to meet other world leaders, making the Xi visit part of a broader diplomatic sprint rather than a standalone event. See CNBC
There is also a symbolic dimension worth noting. Xi has attended the UN General Assembly only once since taking office in 2012, and a state visit to Washington carries its own weight independent of what gets signed. The optics of the visit, a red-carpet welcome, ceremonial trappings, a level of pageantry that marked the Beijing leg in May, will likely matter as much to both domestic audiences as the substance of the talks themselves.
What to watch for, and what not to expect
The summit should not be judged by the number of announcements but by whether it locks in China's prior commitments, preserves U.S. negotiating leverage, and avoids concessions that look better on the day than they do a year later.
A trade "deal" in any comprehensive sense is not on offer; a further extension or refinement of the existing truce is more plausible. On Taiwan and AI, expect careful language rather than resolution, both sides have strong incentive to manage the relationship's temperature without addressing its underlying causes.
In short, the September 24 summit is less a turning point than a checkpoint, an opportunity to see whether the "stability" both governments keep invoking has any substance behind it, or whether it is simply the most convenient word available for a relationship neither side quite knows how to define.