The US president, Donald Trump, has met China’s leader, Xi Jinping, for a momentous summit that will pack negotiations on global conflict, international trade and the future of artificial intelligence into just over 24 hours.
Trump arrived at the Great Hall of the People, an imposing Mao-era building that borders the western edge of Tiananmen Square, on Thursday morning for an opening ceremony followed by an hour of face to face talks with Xi.
Rows of uniformed officers flanked the red carpet laid out in front of the Great Hall of the People as Xi and Trump walked side by side on to a lectern to listen to a welcome salute before being cheered by rows of primary schoolchildren waving US and Chinese flags. The children received a double thumbs up from Trump and a wave from Xi.
The ceremony concluded with a tightly choreographed performance from the Chinese military’s marching band, before Trump and Xi walked up the stairs into China’s national legislature for their first round of bilateral talks.
In opening remarks, Xi noted that 2026 marks 250 years of US independence and said that stability in the US-China relationship was necessary for the world.
Trump said he and Xi had “known each other for a long time” and that Xi was a “great leader”. “I say to everybody you’re a great leader. Sometimes people don’t like me saying it, but I say it anyway, because it’s true,” Trump told Xi.
The Chinese government said the two leaders discussed the war in the Middle East, the Ukraine conflict and issues on the Korean peninsula during two hours of talks.
Xi told Trump the Taiwan question was the “the most important issue in China-US relations”, according to a statement from China’s foreign ministry. Xi warned that the two countries could have “clashes and even conflicts” if the issue was not handled properly. The language underlines rhetoric used by China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, in a recent phone call with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
Trump’s decision to launch strikes against Iran in February, assassinating the leadership of a country with close ties to China and imperilling global energy supplies, has cast a shadow over talks that were supposed to be focused on reaching a trade deal between the world’s two biggest economies.
Rubio said on Air Force One as the Trump team travelled to Beijing that the US would be pushing Beijing for help on the Iran crisis. “We hope to convince them to play a more active role in getting Iran to walk away from what they’re doing now and trying to do now in the Persian Gulf,” he told Fox News. “[China] is both our top political challenge geopolitically, and it’s also the most important relationship for us to manage.”
Beijing hopes to use the meeting to recalibrate US-China ties and set a foundation for a stable and, optimistically, predictable trade relationship going forwards.
Xie Feng, China’s ambassador to the US, said in a column published in the CCP’s official newspaper on Thursday: “Against the backdrop of escalating international instability, the strategic significance of Sino-US relations is even more prominent.”
Xie said that non-interaction between the two superpowers was “not an option”.
It is not clear what concrete outcomes will be achieved at this week’s talks. The Trump administration has talked of establishing a “board of trade” with China to address commercial differences between the countries. Beijing wants to push Trump to soften US support for Taiwan, through a shift in rhetoric or reducing arms sales to the self-governing island, although many in Beijing concede that this is unlikely.
Despite the trip lasting barely two days, Xi and Trump will have plenty of time for interaction on this visit, the first of up to four presidential meetings that are expected this year. In the afternoon the two leaders will tour Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, a Ming dynasty religious complex that has also been visited by Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford.
On Trump’s first visit in 2017, he was the first foreign leader in modern Chinese history to be invited to dine inside the Forbidden City, the sprawling palace complex that housed Chinese emperors for hundreds of years.
There are other differences from 2017’s state visit. This year, Beijing appears to have made less effort to ensure blue skies ahead of Trump’s arrival.
In 2017, factories were ordered to halt production and heavily polluting cars were banned from the roads in the days ahead of Trump’s visit nearly a decade ago, an era in which China had declared war on air pollution and made special efforts to clear the skies ahead of important political events such as visiting dignitaries and the Beijing Olympics.
No such efforts have been made this year. The air quality index in the capital is over 150 today, well over the World Health Organization’s guidelines for healthy air, shrouding the city in a greyish smog full of pollutants that are harmful to human health.
In recent years China’s fight against air pollution has slowed. That is partly because huge improvements have already been made: last year average levels of PM2.5 in Beijing, the most harmful particulate in air pollution, dropped to below 30 for the first time since records began more than a decade ago.
But heavily polluted skies remain a fairly common occurrence. And a visit from the US president is no longer a reason to clear them.
Additional research by Yu-chen Li