President Donald Trump lands in Beijing Thursday for his first state visit to China since 2017, with Polymarket traders pricing a low-drama summit despite his promise of a “big, fat hug” from Xi Jinping.
The two-day meeting covers trade, tariffs, rare earths, the Iran war, Taiwan and AI chip export controls.
Who Holds The Cards?
The Financial Times’s Gideon Rachman wrote today that Trump arrives in Beijing diplomatically weakened, with leverage on rare earths largely gone and the Strait of Hormuz still shut.
Rachman’s call is that Beijing throws Trump a face-saver in the form of “Boeings and beans”: large-ticket purchases of US aircraft and soybeans designed to look like a win without conceding ground on tariffs, Taiwan or technology export controls.
Brookings analyst Patricia Kim has said Beijing believes its leverage over Washington will only grow heading into the November midterm elections.
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