Trump Heads To Beijing As China Signals It Has Little To Concede

Last Updated:May 13, 2026, 13:11 IST

Nearly 10 years after his last visit, Trump is scheduled to arrive in Beijing for a summit with Xi, who has outgrown Trump's tariff playbook and has built the world's largest navy.

Nearly a decade after his last visit, President Donald Trump is scheduled to arrive in Beijing for a summit with Xi Jinping, at a moment when China has outgrown his tariff playbook, built the world’s largest navy, and absorbed a 145% tariff without blinking.

President Donald Trump is headed to Beijing this week for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, his first visit to China in nearly ten years, at a moment when the balance of power between the world’s two largest economies has measurably, and perhaps irreversibly, shifted. Xi is hosting a president whose key economic weapons, chiefly punishing tariffs and technology restrictions, have already been partially neutralised. The question now is not what Trump can extract, but how little Beijing needs to offer to end the meeting on good terms.

The short answer is, “Beijing’s overriding objective is not to accomplish anything affirmative during the summit this week," said Jonathan Czin, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and former US intelligence officer focused on China, speaking to the Wall Street Journal. “They want to buy time and space to prepare for the next round, so they are going to find out the minimum price point to get that from Trump."

A Fortress Built On Trump’s Tariffs

When Trump last dealt with China from a position of real leverage, Beijing was rattled. Its top trade envoy, Liu He, flew back and forth to Washington roughly a dozen times to hammer out the Phase One deal of 2020, which committed China to purchasing over $150 billion in US goods, improving market access for American businesses, and ending forced technology transfers.

Xi drew a lesson from that episode. He called it getting “punched in the face." Then he spent hundreds of billions of dollars making sure it would not happen again.

The strategy, which Xi labelled “fortress China," poured state investment into homegrown technology. And it worked, by most measures. China has caught up with or surpassed the US in batteries, robotics, and advanced manufacturing. Its naval fleet is now the world’s largest. Its nuclear arsenal has expanded to include a full triad: land-based, sea-based, and airborne nuclear capability, something it did not have before.

“Even though it might be hard to quantify, it’s difficult if not impossible to dispute that China is now the second most powerful country in the international system, and in certain categories is stronger than the United States," said Ali Wyne, senior research and advocacy adviser on US-China relations for the International Crisis Group.

When Trump pushed tariffs to 145% last year, Beijing did not negotiate immediately but rather withheld its exports of rare-earth minerals that American manufacturers and the US military depend on.

Washington blinked first. American courts have since invalidated some of Trump’s tariffs, removing further leverage from Trump’s fist.

What The Summit Might Actually Produce

Expectations inside diplomatic circles are described as low. Both governments are discussing the possibility of China purchasing more American agricultural goods, energy products, and Boeing passenger jets. Washington and Beijing are also weighing limited cooperation on artificial intelligence. A proposed US-China “board of trade" has been floated to handle commercial exchanges that fall outside national security restrictions.

The Iran war, which the US and Israel launched against Tehran in late February 2026, has added a complicating variable. It has driven up global energy prices and threatened China’s purchases of Iranian crude oil, which account for roughly 12% of all Chinese oil imports. That economic pressure could push Beijing to play a larger diplomatic role in resolving the conflict, even though it would prefer to stay out of it.

Xi’s Domestic Pressure Points

Beijing is not without vulnerabilities. A prolonged housing market slowdown has stripped millions of Chinese homeowners of wealth and confidence. China’s growth model now depends heavily on exports, and if global demand softens, that becomes an acute problem fast.

Xi has also purged much of his senior military leadership in recent years, ostensibly over corruption. The result is an officer corps that has not seen combat in nearly half a century, now thinned and, by some accounts, demoralised.

But none of that makes Trump’s position easier this week.

“They showed they could weather the storm," Czin said, “and the administration had to climb down from the tariffs and spend most of the past year trying to mollify China."

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