Here's the latest
• Chinese leader Xi Jinping is in the United States for a state visit hosted by President Donald Trump. It’s his first trip to Washington, DC, in over a decade and a landmark meeting that will be closely watched.
• It’s their second summit of the year as they try to manage the most consequential bilateral relationship on the world stage. Trump and Xi are convening as concerns over the risks of AI in particular have reached a fever pitch, spurring calls for guardrails to prevent the technology from spiraling out of control.
• The economic and technological rivals are also expected to discuss key issues including trade, Taiwan and the war in Iran. However, deep mistrust on both sides will likely hamper any significant breakthroughs, experts said.
Taiwan will be warily watching Xi’s meeting with Trump
As US President Donald Trump meets with Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week, Taiwan will be closely watching whether critical arms purchases come up in discussions between the two leaders.
The US is Taiwan’s most important arms supplier and security guarantor. China’s government has consistently opposed arms sales to the island democracy, which Beijing claims as part of its territory, despite having never ruled over it.
Trump has yet to approve an ongoing arms sale package to Taiwan worth around $14 billion, which he has described as a “very good negotiating chip” following his summit with Xi in May.
That has alarmed Taipei. A senior national security official told reporters that Beijing sees delays in US arms sales to Taiwan as way to stall the island’s military buildup.
That in turn gives China more room to exert pressure on Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines, in a part of the world seen by both Beijing and Washington as a critical line of control in the western Pacific.
With the US preoccupied with its Iran war, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the upcoming midterm election, China could issue “blank checks” — such as procurements of US goods or promises to ease Middle East tensions — in exchange for downsized US security commitments in the region, the official said
“China wants to buy time to extend its ability to threaten and exert pressure on the region. It wants to preserve the certain degree of advantage in the region it currently has, and to ensure that this advantage is not eroded,” the official said.
AI will be a "big topic of discussion" with Xi, Trump says
President Donald Trump said Thursday that he plans to discuss artificial intelligence with Chinese leader Xi Jinping during his state visit in Washington.
“A big day with President Xi of China. Super Intelligence (SI) will be a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is,” Trump posted Thursday on Truth Social, using a term he’s recently used to refer to artificial intelligence. “That is China’s position also. Our guardrail is the DOJ!”
Trump frequently stresses the importance of staying ahead of China on AI, saying recently that the US is “leading China in AI … and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.”
The visit, although just beginning, has been warm between the two leaders so far. Trump greeted Xi and his wife when he landed at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday evening.
“I met President Xi at the plane (Airport!) yesterday and he looks strong, vibrant, and fit - Better than ever,” Trump posted Thursday morning. “Madam Xi, of course, BEAUTIFUL!”
China views leader-to-leader talks as key
Face-to-face talks are “absolutely necessary” for managing China’s ties with the Trump administration, an advisor to China’s Foreign Ministry told CNN.
“Frankly speaking, Trump is not necessarily a very stable person,” Wu Xinbo, a Foreign Policy Advisory Committee member of the Chinese Foreign Ministry told CNN.
“So for Xi, what he needs to do is through sustained personal engagement with Trump [then] you can help stabilize relations between two countries,” Wu said.
Sun Chenghao, a senior fellow at Tsinghua University’s center for International Security and Strategy in Beijing told CNN that the task now was to “manage a relationship in which competition is deeper, but interdependence and mutual vulnerability have not disappeared.”
“Beautiful” chocolate cake and bombing Syria: When Trump hosted Xi on US soil
US President Donald Trump last hosted Chinese leader Xi Jinping on American soil at his Mar-a-Lago estate in April 2017.
Over dessert, Trump said he informed Xi that he authorized air strikes in Syria while they were having the “most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you’ve ever seen.”
“I was sitting at the table. We had finished dinner. We’re now having dessert. And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen, and President Xi was enjoying it,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business in 2017.
Trump added that he told Xi that the US had “just fired 59 missiles … heading to Iraq,” incorrectly identifying the country he was striking when relaying the story. Of Xi, Trump said, “And he was eating his cake. And he was silent.”
The US had launched a military strike on a Syrian government airbase in response to a chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of civilians. The strike took place during Xi’s visit to the US.
According to Trump’s account, Xi paused for 10 seconds before telling him via an interpreter that “anybody that was so brutal and uses gases to do that young children and babies, it is “okay” to respond with force.
Chinese state media did not cover this reported exchange between Trump and Xi.
China condemned the use of chemical weapons in any form and said the country is opposed to the use of force in international affairs. “We always hold that the Syrian issue should be resolved through political means,” then-Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying said.
CNN’s Dan Merica and Joshua Berlinger contributed reporting.
40 years ago, Xi visited Iowa to learn about farming
Xi Jinping’s personal experiences of the United States goes back decades, long before he was China’s most powerful leader in a generation.
In 1985, Xi, then a provincial official in the hog-farming Hebei region, led a delegation to “sister state” Iowa to learn about agricultural practices.
He stayed a few nights in an ordinary American home in Muscatine, a small town known for farming, for the largest Heinz plant outside of Pittsburgh and factories that used to produce mother-of-pearl buttons made from the shells of mussels in the Mississippi River.
His hosts put him up in their son’s Star Trek-themed bedroom, who was then away for university. Xi’s itinerary in Muscatine included tours to farms and food processing plants, media interviews, a luncheon and a boat excursion on the Mississippi River, Xinhua reported previously.
Doyle Tubandt, then-president of Muscatine Foods Corp., said in 2016 he escorted Xi on a tour of a corn processing plant. To overcome the language barrier, Tubandt gestured heavily and scrawled drawings in the sand to explain things. Xi also dined on Iowa beef and corn.
In February 2012, Xi made a nostalgic stop in Muscatine during his visit to the US as China’s vice president. While in Iowa, he and other Chinese officials signed a five-year cooperation deal with the US on food security, food safety and sustainable agriculture. He also returned to the Victorian home of Roger and Sarah Lande, where he had dined during his first trip.
Xi has stayed in touch with his “old friends” in Iowa — earlier this year, he replied to a message from them and sent a Chinese New Year card, according to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in February.
CNN’s Moni Basu contributed reporting.
It’s been a busy year of diplomacy for Xi
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has had a packed diplomatic calendar.
Since the beginning of the year, leaders of foreign governments have been lining up to visit Beijing. According to a CNN tally, Xi has hosted leaders from 23 countries in the Chinese capital so far this year, including those from Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Xi has been presenting himself as a power broker with direct lines to a diverse cast of counterparts — and someone who can offer up an alternative to a US-led world order.
In May, Xi hosted separate back-to-back meetings with US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Just several weeks after, he made a rare visit to North Korea and met Kim Jong Un in his first overseas trip this year.
September is Xi’s month of travel amid Trump’s tariff row and as conflict in the Middle East shows little signs of ending.
Xi went to Bishkek to attend the Shanghai Cooperation at the end of August and met with leaders from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Russia. Their conversations covered areas in regional security, connectivity, energy and digital cooperation. Then Xi headed to Egypt for a state visit to seek closer cooperation.
Last week, Xi traveled to India for the BRICS summit and called for unity and cooperation within the bloc.
Here’s what happened the last time Trump and Xi met
In May this year, Chinese leader Xi Jinping hosted US President Donald Trump in Beijing. The three-day visit was short on immediate deals but full of great-power bonhomie and effusive praise from Trump, who called the US-China relationship one of the “most consequential” in world history.
Xi first threw Trump an extravagant welcome ceremony, with a military gun salute and a throng of children waving flags and flowers. Xi then spent an afternoon with Trump which included a walk at the Temple of Heaven, a historic site south of the Forbidden City, once used by emperors to pray for good harvests.
The highlight was during Trump’s last day in Beijing, when Xi invited him for a rare visit to the secretive and highly guarded Communist Party leadership compound known as Zhongnanhai. Only a handful of American leaders have ever set foot inside the compound.
The two leaders strolled through the former imperial garden. Xi talked Trump through the site’s trees and promised to send rose seeds. Later they held talks over tea and lunch.
Not many deliverables came out of it. China has offered up its own version of the US-China relationship, calling it a “constructive strategic stability” – one focused on cooperation and managed competition, rather than the volatile rivalry of last year.
Statements from both China and the US later said the meetings reset the tone between the world’s top economies after a fractious year. They said they will set up two new institutions – a “board of trade” and a “board of investment” – to manage those economic ties.
CNN’s Simone McCarthy, Jessie Yeung and John Liu contributed reporting.
Trump says he’ll discuss Iran among other topics with Xi during summit
President Donald Trump said he would be talking about the state of the Iran war during Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit “and many other subjects,” according to a White House print pool report.
“It’s all coming along,” he told reporters at the White House Wednesday night.
Here’s what else they could discuss:
