Before President Xi Jinping Sets Out to Visit Washington, a Series of Preparatory Meetings

After a whirlwind of visits to Kyrgyzstan, Egypt and India, Xi Jinping will land in Washington, DC, later this week. In many ways, as we have argued earlier, the visits earlier this month were a positioning exercise ahead of Xi’s Washington tour. To appreciate just how sparse his overseas travel has been before this, consider that he was in North Korea in June 2026 and, before that, in South Korea in October 2025. In the same period, Prime Minister Modi has visited 20 countries across three continents.

Nothing dramatic is expected from the summit, but it is part of a larger set of moves in dealing with China’s principal competitor and adversary, the United States.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

On Sunday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met Vice-President He Lifeng of China, at the JP Morgan Chase headquarters in New York to finalise the agenda for the summit. Reports say that Bessent proposed a US-Chinese AI Dialogue with special emphasis on an AI safety national security notification mechanism.

Earlier on Thursday, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi had called his US counterpart, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to discuss the visit. According to Xinhua, Wang told Rubio that both sides should “strengthen communication, advance communication and manage differences, respect each other’s core interests” so as to advance “a constructive and strategically stable relationship.”

While this was the broad message Beijing wants to convey, Xinhua also noted that the two sides discussed the Middle East. On Thursday, Saudi Arabia called on China to get Iran to rein in the Houthis, while Beijing has indicated that it is keen to prevent any further spread of the Middle East conflict and to promote dialogue and a return to negotiations.

Another issue discussed was the possibility of activating more military-to-military communications between the two sides. Last month, Chinese Eastern Theatre Commander Yang Zhibin met his counterpart, US Pacific Command chief Admiral Samuel Paparo, in Canada after a two-year gap.

In July, Vice-Minister Ma Zhaoxu had also visited Washington to work out details of the forthcoming summit. But reports have suggested that the US side has been somewhat lax in its preparations, with the Chinese reportedly still unsure how many seats will be allotted to their delegation at the state banquet. This is not merely a matter of protocol: it also bears on the number of senior Chinese businessmen Xi can bring with him.

This is Xi’s return visit following Donald Trump’s trip to Beijing in May 2025 and comes after the two leaders’ key talks in Busan, South Korea, in October 2025, which broke the logjam in their relationship arising from the tit-for-tat tariffs and export controls the two sides had imposed on each other.

Last October in response to US restrictions on semiconductors and port fees on Chinese ships and a decision to expand the blacklist of Chinese firms that could operate in the US, Beijing announced draconian export controls on rare earth minerals and related technologies. In response, President Trump had announced an additional 100% tariff on all Chinese imports, effective November 1, 2025, on top of the existing 30% baseline tariffs imposed earlier this year for issues like fentanyl trafficking and unfair trade practices.

As a result of the discussions in Busan, the US reduced its average tariffs to 47% while Beijing suspended its rare earth and critical mineral export controls. The US also agreed to delay an enhancement of its blacklist of Chinese firms, while Beijing agreed to resume purchase of US agricultural goods and curb fentanyl precursors. But the agreement established only a one-year temporary pause aimed at stabilising relations which runs out on November 10.

At the Beijing meeting in May, China agreed to increase soybean purchases and purchase a first tranche of 200 Boeing aircraft, while also seeking US help in ensuring spare-parts support. Both sides also agreed to cut tariffs on $30 billion worth of non-sensitive imports from each other.

Before the May meeting, the Chinese had offered to extend the rare-earths moratorium until the end of Trump’s term in January 2029. The US rejected the offer and asked for a six-month extension instead. Both sides have been slow-walking their truce: Chinese rare-earth exports have not resumed at full levels, while the US aircraft parts China needs are coming in somewhat slower than usual.

As we noted last week, “Beijing is attempting to establish a framework for managed competition with the United States over the longer term, along with setting up associated guardrails. It wants Washington to accept that China is not a country to be contained or compelled to change its political system, but a rival power whose interests and status have to be accommodated.”

The Chinese are less interested in specific policy commitments and are focusing instead on the larger goal of achieving a “constructive relationship of strategic stability” with the US.

But a tighter trade accord between China and the US would certainly be desirable towards that end. By now, presumably, both sides have a good measure of each other’s red lines, even though the vagaries of US policy, driven by its unpredictable president, are difficult to forecast.

In February, the US Supreme Court struck down many of Trump’s tariffs. The administration then came up with the pretext of investigating Beijing’s use of forced labour and imposed new 12.5% tariffs on that account.

The US know just how vulnerable they are on the issue of rare earths and magnets. For its part, China realises how important trade remains to its economy and would not want to provoke unnecessary disruption.

Now there is an elephant in the room: the Lindsey O. Graham bill on sanctioning Russia and Iran, which threatens to impose secondary tariffs on countries such as China and India that import oil from Russia or assist in sanctions evasion.

True, the bill has yet to be signed into law, and it provides a 180-day window for countries to comply before they can be hit with tariffs of as much as 100%.

On the day it was passed by the House of Representatives, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs criticised the move, noting that “China opposes long-arm jurisdiction and unilateral sanctions that have no basis in international law and lack a UN Security Council mandate.” China has vowed to take all measures “to firmly safeguard the legitimate and lawful rights and interests” of Chinese companies and nationals.

In other words, the Chinese will almost certainly impose counter-tariffs and retaliate economically against US goods if Trump moves ahead with tariffs on China on account of this bill.

There may be some in the Administration who think they now have significant leverage in dealing with the Chinese. But China is not your average US trading partner. It is a massive global exporter and holds a significant amount of US debt. Beijing is also quite accustomed to using sanctions and export controls as economic weapons and will not hesitate to deploy them, whether against critical minerals or US goods.

Yet another elephant in the room is the putative AI dialogue that was loosely agreed to in the Beijing summit. Now the US is proposing an AI Dialogue with an emphasis on security. The agenda plate is already overfull, but AI is very much around. Reports suggest that Bessent and he have prepared some kind of an agenda covering safety protocols, open and closed weight models and risk management ahead of the summit. But it remains to be seen if there is sufficient meeting ground between the two sides to discuss the issue in a substantive fashion.

Manoj Joshi is a distinguished fellow with the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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