{"id":583119,"date":"2026-05-14T07:07:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T07:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/583119\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T07:07:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T07:07:10","slug":"trump-and-xi-meet-in-beijing-for-key-summit-with-trade-iran-and-ai-on-table-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/583119\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump and Xi meet in Beijing for key summit, with trade, Iran and AI on table | China"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US president, Donald Trump, has met China\u2019s leader, Xi Jinping, for a momentous summit<\/a> that will pack negotiations on global conflict, international trade and the future of artificial intelligence into just over 24 hours.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The ceremony concluded with a tightly choreographed performance from the Chinese military\u2019s marching band, before Trump and Xi walked up the stairs into China\u2019s national legislature for their first round of bilateral talks.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump walks with Xi Jinping during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People. Photograph: Maxim Shemetov\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Trump said he and Xi had \u201cknown each other for a long time\u201d and that Xi was a \u201cgreat leader\u201d. \u201cI say to everybody you\u2019re a great leader. Sometimes people don\u2019t like me saying it, but I say it anyway, because it\u2019s true,\u201d Trump told Xi.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Xi told Trump the Taiwan question was the \u201cthe most important issue in China-US relations\u201d, according to a statement from China\u2019s foreign ministry. Xi warned that the two countries could have \u201cclashes and even conflicts\u201d if the issue was not handled properly. The language underlines rhetoric used by China\u2019s foreign minister, Wang Yi, in a recent phone call with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s two biggest economies.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cWe hope to convince them to play a more active role in getting Iran to walk away<\/a> from what they\u2019re doing now and trying to do now in the Persian Gulf,\u201d he told Fox News. \u201c[China] is both our top political challenge geopolitically, and it\u2019s also the most important relationship for us to manage.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Xie Feng, China\u2019s ambassador to the US, said in a column published in the CCP\u2019s official newspaper on Thursday: \u201cAgainst the backdrop of escalating international instability, the strategic significance of Sino-US relations is even more prominent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump and Xi greet officials at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Photograph: Kenny Holston\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Xie said that non-interaction between the two superpowers was \u201cnot an option\u201d.<\/p>\n

It is not clear what concrete outcomes will be achieved at this week\u2019s talks. The Trump administration<\/a> has talked of establishing a \u201cboard of trade\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Temple of Heaven, a Ming dynasty religious complex that has also been visited by Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford.<\/p>\n

On Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping at a bilateral meeting. Photograph: Alex Wong\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

There are other differences<\/a> from 2017\u2019s state visit. This year, Beijing appears to have made less effort to ensure blue skies ahead of Trump\u2019s arrival.<\/p>\n

In 2017, factories were ordered to halt production and heavily polluting cars were banned from the roads in the days ahead of Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s guidelines for healthy air, shrouding the city in a greyish smog full of pollutants that are harmful to human health.<\/p>\n

In recent years China\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

But heavily polluted skies remain a fairly common occurrence. And a visit from the US president is no longer a reason to clear them.<\/p>\n

Additional research by Yu-chen Li<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The US president, Donald Trump, has met China\u2019s leader, Xi Jinping, for a momentous summit that will pack…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":583120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-583119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}