U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to meet next week at the White House in Washington, D.C., provided that the “conditionalities” attached to the summit are met. This will be the second leaders’ summit between Trump and Xi this year, following the U.S. president’s visit to Beijing in May. 

This will be Xi’s first visit to the U.S. capital in a decade, after he met then-U.S. President Barack Obama in 2016. Back then, the agenda centered on the much-touted issues of cyberespionage and commercial hacking. Today, there are new concerns. 

Both domestically and internationally, this visit is taking place amid considerable friction. On the domestic front, the United States will be holding midterm elections roughly 40 days after the visit. This makes the timing an unusual choice, as noted by Pew Research: many Americans still view the Chinese leader unfavorably, despite a 6-percentage-point rise since last year. Presidents generally avoid such risks to optics as midterms near. 

At the international level, the world is still living under the shadow of the Iran-U.S. war. Consequently, Brent crude is trading around $100 per barrel. At the same time, the China-Russia alignment has deepened; a few months ago – just after the last Trump-Xi summit, in fact – Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed their close partnership and signed a joint statement to deepen their strategic partnership. Beijing is underwriting Moscow’s war machine in Ukraine as Washington prepares to welcome Xi. 

Meanwhile, Pew Research noted in another survey that Beijing is viewed favorably in more countries than Washington, adding another nuance to the global attention focused on the summit.

However, one must note that Beijing has yet to officially confirm the meeting, even though the United States has given the date of September 24. Some reports even suggested that the meeting will be canceled by Beijing if Washington gives approval for a $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan. 

Therefore, the coming week will tell us much about the relationship between China and the United States.

Real Stakes Amid Low Expectations

Even assuming the meeting does go ahead as planned, there are low expectations for what will be achieved. The consensus holds that the tangible outcomes will be modest, possibly just an extension of what was achieved at the last summit held in China. There are four topics of particular interest at the Trump-Xi summit.

First is the tariff question. At the Trump-Xi meeting on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Busan, South Korea, on October 30, 2025, Washington and Beijing agreed to a one-year truce in their trade war. The United States reduced its fentanyl-related tariff on Chinese goods to 10 percent. The U.S. also suspended a 10 percent reciprocal tariff and secured a commitment from Beijing to buy 25 million tons of U.S. soybeans every year through 2028. China also deferred export controls on rare earths. But this truce will expire in November this year. 

The upcoming Trump-Xi meeting will build on these arrangements rather than introduce something entirely novel. Already, the rare earth element in the deal is quite fragile. Some reports have suggested that exports of yttrium – a rare earth element used in the aerospace and defense industries – to the United States have declined sharply after April 2025, despite China’s commitment to waive export controls. Some U.S. officials and analysts have discussed imposing new tariffs and charges on certain Chinese goods. This could be used as leverage in negotiations before the meeting. 

The second focal point is Iran. The ceasefire in the Middle East has collapsed multiple times, a recurring feature of Trump’s foreign policy. Just over a week ago, Iran retaliated against the U.S. strikes on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and hit Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Iraq. 

China is currently Iran’s largest trading partner and the top buyer of its oil, and Washington has declared economic war on Iran. In practice, as Iran is already heavily sanctioned, the new U.S. Treasury Department campaign – dubbed “Operation Economic Outcast” – involves pressuring those who “enabled” Iran’s actions. 

Trump mentioned speaking directly to Xi over this and asking him not to get involved. In May, both China and the United States agreed that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon, but this small point of agreement is being overshadowed by the heightening tension over other issues. 

Third is Taiwan. Taiwan has long remained a thorn in China-U.S. relations. After the summit held in May 2026, Trump called U.S. arms sales to Taiwan a “very good negotiating chip” that he kept in abeyance. This transactional framing alarmed many of the U.S. allies. Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te immediately pushed back against it by declaring that the sovereignty of the island will not be “sacrificed or traded away.” 

More recently, reports emerged that China had threatened to cancel the summit if Trump approved the sale. Getting Washington to agree, even temporarily, to halt arms sales to Taiwan has been a major priority for Beijing since the 1980s. Now that Trump has signaled a willingness to view arms sales as a bargaining chip, rather than a routine aspect of the Taiwan-U.S. relationship, Xi will be looking to lock in that mindset. 

Even if the sale eventually gets approved, the fact that it is seen as a point of leverage by Trump shows the limits of his interest in Taiwan for its own sake. This problem extends well beyond Taiwan itself. Manila’s ongoing standoff with Beijing over maritime features in the South China Sea, notably Scarborough Shoal, is seen by allies as a test of whether Washington will prioritize optics with Beijing over its interests. If Trump signals that he will, not only Taiwan but Tokyo, Manila, and others can interpret their security guarantees as “negotiable,” especially when they clash with China. This will test the whole alliance architecture in Asia. 

The fourth area to watch is AI, which is at the heart of the U.S. strategy on China. Under the Biden administration, export controls effectively banned advanced AI chips from reaching China. Trump also tightened these restrictions in April 2025. However, he sharply reversed that policy between December 2025 and January 2026. The administration changed its approach to Nvidia’s H200 chips from a “presumption of denial” of exports to China to case-by-case approval. Chinese firms placed orders for millions of H200 chips. Trump touted it as a business deal, not as a national security issue. This caused some alarm and pushback within the United States.

On the other hand, even strict export control rules are easy to circumvent. Big Chinese firms like ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have been using Nvidia chips sourced from third countries such as Japan, Thailand, and Malaysia rather than shipping them directly into China. 

Amid all these controls, China is still progressing well in AI, though it remains behind the United States. However, their models now account for a much larger share of global AI usage than before, thanks to China’s open-weight strategies and more efficient models. Such contradictions in the U.S. policy will be very visible in the upcoming meetings. 

Anyone hoping for a serious discussion on AI safety regulations, meanwhile, is likely to be disappointed. While there have been rumors of upcoming AI talks around the time of the Trump-Xi summit, both states see themselves locked in competition for dominance of AI, and are unlikely to pump the brakes. 

Implications for India

India will be closely watching all developments in Washington next week. Last year, Trump left no stone unturned in pressuring India, adding a 50 percent tariff on Indian goods in response to New Delhi’s continued purchases of Russian oil. Trump himself, after seeing Xi, Putin, and India’s Narendra Modi together in a summit last year, posted that the U.S. had “lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China.” In February 2026, a framework India-U.S. deal eased the effective tariff rate from 50 percent to 18 percent, but the damage to the trust was already done. 

Just days before the upcoming Trump-Xi meeting, Xi was in Delhi for the BRICS summit; both governments said they were committed to working toward the border dispute, resuming direct flights and relaxing investment restrictions. The New Delhi Declaration also voiced opposition to unilateral imposition of tariffs and trade restrictions and called for reform in the multipolar global order. However, genuine issues still prevail between New Delhi and Beijing. 

Seen from New Delhi, therefore, the meeting next week will signal to India where it stands in Washington’s priorities and whether Trump’s transactional policy continues to impact India-U.S. ties. Many countries will be watching the summit for similar signs, meaning the ripples will spread far beyond bilateral China-U.S. relations.