Trump’s Beijing Gambit: Can the Xi Summit Actually Deliver a Trade Deal?
May 11, 2026 · Analysis · David Foster
When Air Force One touches down in Beijing on May 13, President Donald Trump will become the first sitting American president to visit China in nearly a decade. The symbolism is impossible to miss. After years of tariff escalation, diplomatic confrontations, and mutual recrimination, two leaders who have defined the most consequential bilateral relationship in the world are sitting across from each other again. The question in every boardroom, trading desk, and foreign ministry from Washington to Brussels is straightforward: will this visit produce a meaningful deal, or is it theatre?
The honest answer is that both outcomes are possible, but neither is probable in the form the markets are pricing. The Trump-Xi summit of May 2026 will almost certainly produce a joint statement, some preliminary agreements on specific sectors, and a framework for continued negotiations. What it is unlikely to produce is a comprehensive deal that reverses the structural damage of seven years of trade war. Understanding why requires looking at what both sides actually want — and what they are unwilling to give up.
What Trump Wants
Trump’s tariff architecture has evolved considerably since the sweeping import taxes unveiled in April 2025. The initial shock — tariffs of 100% or more on Chinese goods — was followed by a strategic pause after the leaders met in South Korea in October 2025. Since then, the White House has been working to extract what it calls “phase two” commitments: structural changes to China’s trade practices, not just superficial purchase commitments designed to balance trade flows temporarily.
The administration’s core demands remain consistent with the 2018 playbook, even if the rhetoric has sharpened. Washington wants China to stop subsidizing strategic industries, to open its market more fully to American firms, and to address what American officials describe as “non-market practices” that distort competition. These are not new complaints. What is new is the urgency. American farmers, manufacturers, and tech firms have spent years adapting to the absence of a stable Chinese market. The companies that survived the tariff era have restructured their supply chains. A deal that merely pauses tariffs without addressing the underlying conditions will leave those firms worse off than they were before the trade war started.
“Trump needs a win before midterms, but a real deal requires China to concede on issues it has spent a decade fortifying against American pressure. The gap between what Trump will claim and what China will actually deliver is likely to be enormous.”
— Ning Leng, Georgetown University
There is also a domestic political dimension that complicates the calculus. Trump is being accompanied on this trip by executives from Boeing, Citigroup, and Qualcomm — companies with significant commercial interests in China that have spent years navigating a deteriorating bilateral relationship. Their presence suggests the administration is seeking private sector wins that can be announced alongside any formal agreement. Boeing, in particular, has watched its China order book shrink as tensions escalated. An order for 50 or 100 aircraft would be exactly the kind of headline Trump needs to justify the visit as a success, regardless of what the broader framework says.
What China Wants
Xi Jinping approaches this summit from a position that is simultaneously stronger and weaker than it appears. On the surface, China’s economy is under significant pressure. Sluggish domestic consumption, a property sector that has yet to fully recover from the 2021-2023 crackdown, elevated unemployment — particularly among young urban graduates — and a technology sector still adapting to American export controls all constrain Xi’s leverage. The argument that China needs a trade deal more urgently than the United States does has real merit.
But China’s position in the broader geopolitical contest has strengthened in ways that complicate Washington’s negotiating posture. The BRICS alliance has expanded significantly since 2024, and the infrastructure for dedollarized trade — the CIPS payment system, bilateral currency swap agreements, yuan-denominated commodity contracts — has matured to the point where it offers a genuine alternative to dollar-based settlement for a growing share of China’s international trade. China is no longer as vulnerable to American financial pressure as it was in 2018.
“Beijing will offer just enough to keep the talks alive and the tariffs at their current levels. What it will not do is concede on the industrial policy structures that have built its technological capacity. Those are existential for the Chinese Communist Party, and Xi knows it.”
— Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics
Xi is also acutely aware of the political dynamics on the American side. He knows that Trump needs a visible win, and he is prepared to offer the minimum necessary to sustain the appearance of progress without making substantive concessions. This is a pattern that has repeated across multiple rounds of negotiations, and it has consistently favored Beijing over Washington. China has gotten very good at managing American expectations downward while extracting maximum diplomatic value from each interaction.
The Broader Stakes: Beyond Bilateral Trade
The Trump-Xi summit takes place against a backdrop of geopolitical realignment that neither leader can afford to ignore. The Russia-China-Iran nexus that has solidified since 2022 has created a new strategic reality in which China’s bilateral relationship with the United States no longer operates in isolation. Beijing’s deepening ties with Moscow — including the “no limits” partnership and more than $240 billion in bilateral trade — have given China options it did not have during the first Trump administration.
This matters for the summit because it changes the cost-benefit calculation for China. In 2018, a prolonged trade war with the United States genuinely threatened to destabilize China’s economic position. Today, China has spent seven years building alternative markets, developing substitute technologies, and deepening relationships with partners who share its interest in a multipolar order. The cost of holding firm in negotiations is significantly lower than it was then.
For the United States, the summit is also entangled with broader questions about American alliances and the rules-based order. Trump’s “America First” approach has created uncertainty among traditional allies in Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Indo-Pacific. The companies traveling with Trump — Boeing, Qualcomm, Citigroup — represent decades of American commercial engagement with China that successive administrations assumed would build toward convergence. That assumption has collapsed. What remains is a transactional relationship in which both sides calculate gains and losses with increasing precision.
What to Expect
The most likely outcome of the May 2026 summit is an extension of the current tariff pause with a framework for continued negotiations. China will likely announce new purchase commitments in specific sectors — energy, agriculture, aviation — that can be framed as a reduction in the bilateral trade deficit. The Trump administration will announce a victory and point to the Boeing deal as evidence of American commercial reach. Markets will respond positively for a few days, and then the structural questions will resurface.
The deeper problem — that the United States and China have fundamentally incompatible economic models that cannot be reconciled through a trade deal — will remain unaddressed. American tariffs on Chinese goods will stay largely in place. Chinese subsidies for strategic industries will continue. The technology decoupling that has accelerated since 2022 will proceed, with or without a summit. The Beijing summit may produce a diplomatic thaw, but it will not resolve the underlying tensions that have made the trade war a permanent feature of the global economy.
“The best-case scenario is a ceasefire. The worst-case is a breakdown that leads to another round of tariff escalation in the summer. Both outcomes are consistent with what we have seen from this relationship over the past seven years.”
— Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics
What the summit will not produce is the comprehensive restructuring of Chinese trade practices that American officials describe as their objective. Beijing has shown no willingness to dismantle the industrial policy architecture that has powered its rise. Washington has shown no willingness to accept Chinese competition in the technologies it considers strategic. Somewhere between those two positions lies the summit’s likely result: an agreement to keep talking, and a postponement of the harder decisions that both sides know are coming.
David Foster is a Senior Analyst for Media Hook, specializing in geopolitical analysis, economic trends, and the forces reshaping the global order.
