Trump gets red carpet treatment in China, rift remains deep

Trump landed in Beijing to a ceremonial welcome that Beijing clearly meant as a signal of strength, not reconciliation. Vice-President Han Zheng greeted him at the airport, and as Trump descended Air Force One, 300 young Chinese men and women waved Chinese and American flags along the red carpet. The visit marked Trump’s first trip to China since 2017 and the first state visit by a sitting U.S. president in nearly nine years, but the pageantry was only the opening act.

The real test was set for Thursday and Friday, when Trump and Xi Jinping were due to take up trade, technology, Taiwan, artificial intelligence, rare earth export controls and the Iran war. Trump said before departure that he would have a long talk with Xi, but the agenda already looked narrower than the grand bargain some in Washington once imagined. Trump also arrived with a business-heavy entourage, including executives such as Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg and Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, underscoring how much the White House was still hoping for commercial wins even as the geopolitical file stayed crowded.

The economic backdrop was far more durable than the ceremony. The trade war began with Trump’s April 2025 tariff shock, when he imposed 34% tariffs on Chinese goods. China retaliated, the escalation pushed tariffs as high as 145%, and both sides eventually called a truce, with Beijing promising soybean purchases and Washington cutting tariffs by more than half. Even so, the truce was only partial. U.S. and Chinese officials were still considering extending a separate pause on Chinese rare earth export curbs, while customs data showed exports of heavy rare earths such as yttrium, dysprosium and terbium were still down about 50% from the year before the restrictions began.

That is why the summit’s most meaningful measure was what it did not produce. Washington and Beijing remained locked in disputes over Taiwan arms sales, Chinese subsidies, military expansion in the Indo-Pacific and accusations that China was running industrial-scale campaigns to steal American AI technology. Analysts said both sides still valued stability, but the likely outcome was little more than a managed pause, not a settlement. In Beijing, the red carpet was the easy part. The deeper rift stayed intact.