A tale of two presidents in Beijing

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From May 13 to 15, 2026, more than eight years after his first “plus-state visit” to Beijing, U.S. President Donald Trump made a smaller, but higher-stakes, state visit to China. Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping resulted in a series of engagements, including a planned reciprocal visit to Washington in September 2026, signaling that hope for strategic restraint could yet return to the bilateral relationship.

Relations between the United States and China began to collapse a month after Trump’s visit to Beijing in November 2017, with the release of the 2017 National Security Strategy. The 2017 National Security Strategy characterized China as a “revisionist” power engaged in a long-term “geopolitical competition” with the United States. Following a Section 301 investigation into China’s technology transfer policies and practices, the US-China trade war was triggered in March 2018. In May 2019, the technology war shifted into high gear when Huawei was placed on the US Department of Commerce’s Entity List.

China and the United States – or at least its president – ​​appear to have come full circle in May.

In Beijing, the two presidents used the steering wheel of diplomacy led by their leaders to steer their bilateral relations towards one of “constructive strategic stability‘based on’equity and reciprocity‘. For Xi, he expects a more conducive environment for realizing China’s modernization goals. For Trump, this means a less lopsided trade relationship that favors the interests of American businesses. Their divergent goals aside, the framing is as welcome as it is necessary. Since the collapse of the strategic consensus bequeathed by Richard Nixon, Mao Zedong and Henry Kissinger, bilateral relations have groped, unsuccessfully, in search of a new guiding strategic framework.

In Beijing, the two presidents established a U.S.-China Business Council and a U.S.-China Investment Council. While the former will provide a scaffold to manage their trade in “non-sensitive” goods by identifying products benefiting from mutual tariff reductions and exemptions, the terms of reference for the latter remain unclear. Trump himself may not be opposed to Chinese companies selling American-made products made with American labor to American consumers. But his administration America First Investment Policy plans to prevent those affiliated with China from investing in U.S. advanced technologies, critical infrastructure, agriculture, energy, raw materials and other strategic sectors.

The two presidents also approved a series of commitments related to the purchase of American agricultural products, aircraft and energy, as well as the resolution of irritants linked to the flow of Chinese rare earths. The announcement that China will order 200 Boeing jets is cleverly linked to the supply of engines and parts for China’s C919 narrow-body aircraft. Common cause also emerged regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, as well as “their shared goal of denuclearizing North Korea,” although discussions of U.S. arms exports to Taiwan were less salutary.

More importantly, the two leaders set late September 2026 as the date for Xi’s next visit to Washington. There has not been a visit to the White House by a Chinese president or the release of a joint presidential statement in more than a decade.

On September 24, 2026 at the White House, the two presidents must renew for another year their Busan Consensus on commercial and technological competition. THE ‘Busan Consensusis vital as a suspension of key export controls as well as additional tariffs in exchange for the status quo of essential mineral flows.

Next, Trump and Xi should endow their Board of Trade and Board of Investment with tariff reductions and sectoral exclusions. Rather than viewing the two councils in terms of decoupling, their goal should be to compartmentalize and regulate competition so that proven areas of mutual gain, such as agriculture, selective industrial investment, and public health, can be exploited as stabilizing ballast. Blacklisting Chinese know-how will not make American industrial realities disappear.

Both sides should advance their dialogue on artificial intelligence to prevent the spread of this powerful technology to malicious third-party actors, including non-state actors. The two parties should also establish a tripolar frame with Moscow for discussions on strategic stability and arms control. Nuclear testing, transparency, risk reduction, force sizing and vectors must be put on the discussion table.

Above all, Xi must pressure Trump to gradually reverse the unsatisfactory direction of the US “one China” policy, which has been reduced to a unilateral warning about the status quo across the Straits.

Rather than once again relying on a US president to “oppose” Taiwan independence, Xi should invite Trump to support Taiwan independence. 1992 consensus in any way, language chosen by the United States. Supporting a dialogue platform that could lower the temperature across the Strait should be a logical solution, given that official U.S. policy is to do not use Taiwan’s card to rival or contain China and does not contest efforts to resolve their dispute peacefully.

Trump may seem like an unlikely figure to co-write a new era of predictable, contained U.S.-China relations. Such a framework would, however, be shortsighted. Trump considers himself a proponent of great power diplomacy, even harboring pretensions as a historic statesman. Unlike all previous U.S. administrations, the head of the Trump administration’s China desk sits behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. Alongside US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is responsible for trade and technology negotiations, the two men are exceptions in an administration filled with anti-China voices.

Beijing must emphasize the potential role the country can play in advancing the interests of American workers, farmers and families, as well as the role Chinese companies could play in furthering U.S. industrial expansion. The framework for a win-win relationship over the next three years, with adequate leverage and guarantees available to each party, can be developed on this basis.

A spring of hope, rather than a winter of despair, can return to bilateral relations between the United States and China.

Sourabh Gupta is a senior fellow at the Institute for Chinese American Studies in Washington, DC.