Chinese investment in the US is unlikely to recover meaningfully from its mid-2010s collapse even if President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump reach a bilateral deal when they meet in Beijing next month, according to a report released on Thursday.

Rhodium Group, an American research firm that tracks China’s cross-border investment, said Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in the United States had “fallen significantly from its 2016 peak, and remained at low levels for the past five years” and was “unlikely to return to those levels”.

It said Chinese investment in the US had fallen 90 per cent from its 2014-2017 peak, steeper than the drop in investment from any other major economy and worse than the 57 per cent global decline. Cumulative Chinese direct investment in the US over the past decade amounted to roughly US$190 billion, “less than a fifth of the US$1 trillion figure floated during the Madrid talks” on a trade deal in September.

In 2024, China ranked 17th among countries by new FDI spending in the US at US$589 million, against US$30.1 billion for top investor Ireland, according to data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Rhodium said Italian companies had invested four times more in the US than Chinese ones over the past five years.

The findings cast a shadow over an expected summit between the two leaders in mid-May. Reviving reciprocal investment between the world’s two biggest economies was among the topics raised during bilateral talks in Paris in March.