Trump heads to Beijing amid war, trade tensions and hardened rivalry

BANGKOK/PHILADELPHIA/SINGAPORE – US President Donald Trump will arrive in Beijing on May 13 under a vastly different backdrop from his lavish “state visit-plus” nearly a decade ago, when Chinese President Xi Jinping escorted him on an atmospheric evening tour of the Forbidden City.

The broad rivalry between Washington and Beijing, encompassing trade, technology and supply chain pressure points, has hardened amid war in the Middle East, a global energy disruption and a fragile pause in the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

The fallout from Mr Trump’s military adventurism, combined with his administration’s broader challenge to traditional alliances and international norms, has raised questions among friends and foes alike about the durability of American power and the international order.

While Beijing is likely to welcome the strategic space ceded by Washington’s growing distractions abroad, Chinese leaders are also wary of becoming too deeply entangled in the fallout over a prolonged Middle East conflict.

Even as the crisis reinforces Mr Xi’s long-running push for self-reliance and industrial resilience, China can ill-afford global instability or a renewed trade war, given how its economic growth remains uneven and largely dependent on exports.

In reality, both China and the US are learning the limitations of coercion.

Mr Trump arrives in Beijing on the evening of May 13, and is scheduled to hold meetings with Mr Xi over the following two days. Mr Trump has quipped that he expects a “big, fat hug” from Mr Xi when they meet. “It’s going to be, I think, quite amazing,” he subsequently said on May 7. “He’s been a friend of mine. I’ve gotten along with him very well over the years.”

The US President’s characteristically colourful remarks nonetheless capture both Mr Trump’s predilection for strongman rulers and his belief in his ability to leverage his personal relationships to wheel and deal superior outcomes.

In Beijing, he is likely to find interlocutors willing to play to those vanities if it suits their interests: Foreign Minister Wang Yi has notably described direct “leaders’ diplomacy” between Mr Xi and Mr Trump as the “guiding star” of bilateral ties.

Mr Trump’s previous visit to Beijing in November 2017 saw the two leaders and their wives walking through the Forbidden City’s floodlit courtyards under the night sky, before dinner and a traditional opera performance within the palace complex.

That carefully choreographed night in Beijing, however, took place at an early and very different moment in the relationship. Within months, the Trump administration launched the trade war that has come to define the past decade of the world’s most important bilateral relationship. Confrontation over tariffs, technology and economic security continued and even deepened in the intervening four years when Mr Trump was not in the White House.

And while any head of state visiting Beijing will be afforded decorum and protocol, there will no doubt be comparisons between both the substance and tone of the two visits.

Even at the best of times, high-level engagement and state visits between Beijing and Washington are invariably more about managing optics and avoiding embarrassment rather than delivering decisive policy breakthroughs.

The distraction of the Middle East quagmire and the slew of opportunities for follow-up meetings later this year – including a possible reciprocal state visit by Mr Xi to Washington, as well as the APEC and G-20 summits being held in Shenzhen and Miami respectively at the end of the year – may diffuse some of the pressure on this May visit.

But maintaining dialogue remains important in managing competition under pressure and establishing rules for competitive coexistence. And, with this meeting postponed from March due to the war in the Middle East, some might consider it a small win for both countries that it is happening at all.

“Neither side has high expectations for this summit,” said Mr Qiu Mingda, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group. “It’ll be considered a success as long as they meet. Optics matter.”

Mr Han Lin, China managing director at The Asia Group, a strategic advisory firm headquartered in Washington, noted that five decades of US-China summits have demonstrated they rarely meaningfully transform the relationship.

“But when handled well, they make a dangerous rivalry less volatile,” he told The Straits Times.

Mr Qiu said Chinese leaders were very keen for Mr Trump to visit because they viewed most other politicians on Capitol Hill to be considerably more hawkish on China than the President.

“This is why Beijing places so much importance on ‘leaders’ diplomacy’,” he said.

Likewise, Dr Zack Cooper, who studies US-China competition at the American Enterprise Institute, said he is not expecting to see any “true success”.

“I think success would require real tangible progress on fundamental issues in the US-China relationship,” he told ST.

“My sense is that items like over-capacity and security tensions are not really on the agenda, so true success is highly unlikely. Instead, many will hope simply for a trip with no major incidents or additional concessions to Beijing. That is a low bar, but perhaps a more realistic one,” he said.

Mr Trump had reignited the trade war almost immediately after returning to the White House with his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025, which alongside fentanyl-related duties pushed tariffs on Chinese goods to as high as 145 per cent.

Beijing retaliated with its own suite of tariffs, expanded export controls, and perhaps most crucially, restrictions on the export of rare earths and critical minerals.

A fragile truce was reached after Mr Trump and Mr Xi met in Busan on the sidelines of the APEC Summit in Gyeongju in October 2025, pausing further escalation in exchange for reduced tariffs, resumed Chinese rare earth exports and renewed purchases of US agricultural goods.

While overall expectations for the Beijing summit are low, it provides the opportunity for both sides to air pressing concerns in the bilateral relationship.

Dr Scott Kennedy, senior adviser and trustee chair in Chinese business and economics at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the US will have “five Bs” on its agenda: Boeing, beef, beans, the Board of Trade, and the Board of Investment.

China’s focus will be on “three Ts”. “The first T is, of course, Taiwan. But then also tariffs and technology,” he said at a press briefing on May 7.

The Board of Trade and Board of Investment are new bilateral mechanisms proposed by the Trump administration to manage trade and investment disputes in non-sensitive sectors through regular high-level engagement.

Speaking to reporters in Washington on May 11, Mr Trump said he would discuss with Mr Xi the issue of arms sales to Taiwan, as well as energy security and Iran. “(Mr Xi) will bring up Taiwan, I think more than I will,” he said.

The same day, Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said: “China is willing to work with the US, in the spirit of equality, respect and mutual benefit, to expand cooperation, manage differences, and inject greater stability and certainty into a turbulent and uncertain world.”

There is expected to be some modest headway in how the US and China will manage their economic relationship, allowing both leaders to claim wins from the summit by picking low-hanging fruit.

Both countries are expected to announce plans for the Board of Trade and Board of Investment, while China is expected to announce purchases related to Boeing airplanes, ​American agriculture and energy, Reuters reported, citing unnamed US officials.

The two countries will also discuss extending a truce in their trade war that has ​allowed rare earth minerals to flow from China to the US, though it is unclear if the agreement will be extended this week.

“Although the truce only expires later this year in November, extending it now can instil certainty into markets,” Mr Qiu said. “And also in the latter half of this year, both sides will be busy with domestic politics – China with the plenum and the US with the midterms – and would prefer not to be distracted by trade.”

China’s biggest ask from the US, he added, would be a further reduction of the fentanyl tax – hopefully to zero. A cut would send a very positive signal that the US has made a concession beyond the Busan summit, when Mr Trump agreed to halve the fentanyl tax to 10 per cent.

The biggest risk, meanwhile, is that China overplays its hand if it perceives Mr Trump as weakened by Middle East tensions and domestic pressures, Asia Group’s Mr Lin said.

“If Trump concludes that China hasn’t offered enough, he may cede greater influence to the more hawkish voices in his administration, an outcome that would likely drive escalation in US-China relations,” Mr Lin said.

“Fentanyl cooperation, select tariff rollbacks, and resumed military-to-military communication are achievable. The harder issues – chips, Taiwan, Iran – will be managed, not resolved,” he predicted.

The stakes surrounding the summit extend far beyond trade and tariffs. Washington and Beijing are increasingly testing how much pressure the other can absorb in a world where the traditional international order is fraying and energy, supply chains and choke points like the Strait of Hormuz have become instruments of coercion.

Washington’s military adventurism in the Middle East has been widely considered a strategic blunder and helps Mr Xi justify his long-running narrative for resilience and self-reliance.

Beijing benefits from Washington’s diversion of political attention, and military assets, away from Asia. And the renewed wake-up call around energy security may see countries double down on renewables, electric vehicles and battery storage, all sectors where China is dominant.

On the surface, it would appear that China has few levers to pull in influencing the outcome of the war. But Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s visit to Beijing less than a week before the summit shows that China is positioning itself as an indispensable diplomatic player in the crisis. It was also a reminder to Washington of Beijing’s influence with Tehran and its growing diplomatic stature in the Gulf and Global South.

Yet it remains unclear whether Beijing is willing to step far outside its traditional diplomatic comfort zone, having long preferred to let the US over-extend itself with the sustained strategic and military burden required, while it continues to bide its time and accumulate, if not hide, its strength.

Nonetheless, the trajectory of global affairs is such that even if the meeting between the world’s two most powerful leaders ends in a fruitless deadlock, China may still come out stronger.

Dr Kennedy said China’s relative position to the US over the past year has improved, following the successful pushback against Liberation Day tariffs. And China’s leverage had only grown after the Supreme Court ruled in February that the Trump administration’s imposition of tariffs was unlawful, and with the US being bogged down in the Iran war.

“China and Xi Jinping come into this meeting in a much stronger place than the US. China has goals that they would like – to extend the ceasefire, to reduce tech restrictions on the imports of semiconductors, and lower tariffs,” he said.

“But even if they don’t get much on any of those things, as long as there’s not a blow-up in the meeting and President Trump doesn’t go away and look to re-escalate, China basically comes out stronger.”

Mr Daniel Kritenbrink, partner at The Asia Group, said the view in Beijing was that China was merely taking its more natural and central order in the international system, “and the events of the last year or two have accelerated that fact”.

But “even in light of this incredible Chinese self-confidence and almost bordering on hubris, we also see China still very much wants stability with the US, and they see that as one key to managing this transition period”.

And irrespective of how things transpire this week, Mr Kritenbrink, a former US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said the long-term drivers of US-China competition, rivalry and instability remain wholly unchanged.

“We should keep that in mind, because this fragile truce, no matter what happens later this week, will remain under significant pressure regardless,” he said.