When the plane bearing the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, lands at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday afternoon, his American counterpart will be waiting for him. U.S. Presidents usually receive heads of state at the White House, but the esteem with which Donald Trump appears to hold Xi, and the weight of this visit from the leader of the United States’ closest peer competitor—the first of its kind in a decade—are apparently such that Trump decided to greet him on the tarmac. On Thursday, when Xi goes to the White House, the two leaders will hear the U.S. Marine Band play both of their national anthems and watch a military flyover featuring a B-2 stealth bomber and four F-22 Raptors. When the President went to Beijing in May, he did not get an airport pickup from Xi, and when Xi later escorted him to the Great Hall of the People, they were met by a group of children, who chanted “Welcome!” and waved Chinese and American flags. Optics are paramount for Xi, who presides over a sprawling but opaque one-party state apparatus, and comes to the United States leaving behind a mounting set of domestic woes, including sluggish economic growth and stubbornly high youth unemployment. But he will begin his time in Washington as Trump’s honored guest, more fêted than leaders of allied nations who have called on Trump during his turbulent second term.
What will follow—closed-door meetings between Trump and Xi, with their staffers, scheduled amid the hurried summitry; a state dinner crowded with tech C.E.O.s and other A-listers; a tea involving the Presidents and their spouses, all of it likely covered by a reduced press corps following Trump’s ban on three major media outlets—is murkier. Despite the pomp, expectations for tangible results are low, with Trump and Xi’s personal rapport belying a chasm of distrust and tension between Beijing and Washington.
China has played a central role in the past decade of Trumpist politics. Initially, for Trump the campaigner, China was the embodiment of U.S. folly, a country catapulted to superpower status thanks to the naïveté and the cupidity of the American globalist class, which, a generation ago, opened the doors for China’s manufacturing juggernaut to take over the global economy, hollowing out factories and disappearing working-class jobs in the West. For Trump the President, China was, in his first term, a clear strategic rival to be reined in by tough policies, including the first blows of a trade war that lingered through the Biden Administration, which took a similarly tough, if more calibrated, approach to Beijing. But, in Trump’s second term, his tone has changed—in April of last year, China responded to his unprecedented tariffs with expanded export controls that showcased the dominance of its critical-mineral supply chains, which many U.S. companies depend on. Trump backtracked, and has conspicuously softened his stance. He delayed arms sales to Taiwan, the autonomous island democracy whose return to mainland rule Xi says is a “historical inevitability,” and appears to have tolerated China’s insufficient purchases of U.S. agricultural products that Xi had pledged to fulfill.