President Donald Trump is set to host Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington this week for a state visit focused on trade, artificial intelligence, and critical minerals, with Taiwan and the war with Iran also likely to feature in talks.
The meeting will be the leaders’ second this year and comes after Mr Trump’s visit to China in May. It will also mark Mr Xi’s first White House visit in a decade.
“We’re going to have a lot of different deals,” Mr Trump said on Friday. “We’re not just doing it for our health. We’re going to have some pretty important meetings.”
“We get along very well,” he said. “President Xi and I have a good relationship.”
Mr Trump has long railed against China’s dominance in manufacturing and its competition with the US in areas including AI and electric vehicles. But he has also sought to cultivate cordial relations with Mr Xi, whom he has repeatedly described as a “great leader”.
The US President has expanded an area behind the White House for helicopters to land and has lamented that the large ballroom under construction will not be ready for the state dinner.
“It’s too bad we don’t have the ballroom open because if we did, we could have 1,000s, we could have 2,000 people having dinner. They would love that,” he told reporters on Friday.
Senior US officials said the two leaders are expected to discuss trade, the flow of rare earths and critical minerals to global markets, and AI.
“I think this is the summit of the three Ts: Taiwan, technology, and trade, and that’ll be the topic,” said James Lewis, a fellow at the Centre for European Policy Analysis. “No one is expecting any big breakthroughs.”
Critical minerals have emerged as one of the most significant bargaining chips in US-China relations.
Washington wants Beijing to deliver on commitments to ease restrictions on rare-earth exports, while China wants to retain its dominance over the processing and manufacturing of materials essential to the US technology and defence industries.
China’s one-year suspension of sweeping rare-earth export controls, announced in October 2025, is due to expire on November 10, giving Beijing significant leverage as the two sides negotiate an extension of their broader trade truce.
During Mr Trump's visit to China earlier this year, the topic of Taiwan featured prominently at the summit, with Beijing declaring it “the most important issue in China-US relations”.
Mr Trump has previously described US arms sales to Taiwan as a potential “negotiating chip” and a roughly $14 billion US arms package for Taiwan is awaiting final approval.
While Mr Xi is expected to press Mr Trump on abandoning the sale, the White House is likely to maintain its ambiguous stance.
Iran war
The visit comes amid the US war with Iran, which has disrupted energy markets and become another point of tension between Washington and Beijing.
Mr Trump has for weeks pressed China to reduce its purchases of Iranian oil as part of efforts to increase economic pressure on Tehran. China is the biggest buyer of Iranian oil and maintains close ties with the Iranian government.
The US has so far stopped short of imposing direct penalties on Chinese banks over their dealings with Iran.
Experts say China could instead use its relationship with Tehran to encourage de-escalation.
“China can facilitate dialogue and send implied messages that will apply pressure on Iran for de-escalation,” said Yun Sun, a China expert at the Stimson Centre.
“Xi will ask what is the US and Israel willing to put on the table in order to make a deal, because it cannot be just unilateral concessions by Iran,” she said.
“From the Chinese perspective, just making Iran make concessions — that’s unlikely to fly.”
A senior US official said Mr Trump plans to greet Mr Xi at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday, a rare move for an American president. The visit will include a formal arrival ceremony at the White House and a military review in the Rose Garden.
On Thursday, the two leaders will hold their main bilateral meeting at the White House, followed by a state dinner in the evening.
Technology executives, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Apple’s Tim Cook, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang are expected to attend the dinner.
The Trump administration has pushed back against the need for additional regulations or any US slowdown in developing artificial intelligence, saying among other things that this would hand China the advantage.
