Donald Trump said China and the US will have a “fantastic future” and Xi Jinping stressed partnership over rivalry in a meeting, setting a positive tone for the first visit by a sitting US president to Beijing in nearly a decade.
“We should be partners, not rivals,” Xi said in his opening remarks. “We should help each other succeed and prosper together and find the right way for major countries to get along well with each other in the new era.”
The two leaders met in the Great Hall of the People off Tiananmen Square on Thursday morning after a welcome ceremony featuring honor guards and carefully choreographed pageantry.
Speaking after Xi, Trump praised the reception he received and called Xi a “great leader.”
“The relationship between China and the USA is going to be better than ever before,” Trump said.
He highlighted the business delegation joining his trip that includes Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Tesla’s Elon Musk. The US corporate leaders are “here today to pay respects to you and to China, and they look forward to trade and doing business, and it’s going to be totally reciprocal on our behalf,” he said.
At the welcome ceremony, Xi and Trump walked together and stopped to greet top Chinese officials, starting with Cai Qi, Xi’s chief of staff, followed by the US delegation, which included US Ambassador to China, David Perdue, as well as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Relations between Washington and Beijing have stabilized since the two presidents met last October in Busan, South Korea. But tensions have remained, with the US-Israeli war against Iran representing the latest flash point.
Discord also persists over China’s dominance over the supply of rare earths and American export controls that limit the ability of Chinese companies to access cutting-edge chips.
Ahead of the meeting, Rubio said the relationship with China was “both our top political challenge, geopolitically, and it’s also the most important relationship for us to manage.”
“It’s a big, powerful country. It’s going to continue to grow, but we’re going to have interests of ours that are going to be in conflict with interests of theirs,” Rubio said in an interview with Fox News taped aboard Air Force One and airing shortly ahead of the meeting.
While specific outcomes from the discussions likely won’t become clear until the summit concludes, topics on the agenda are expected to include trade, tariffs, Taiwan and Iran. Trump, who included a group of US corporate executives including Musk and Huang in his delegation, said his first priority would be asking Xi to roll back trade barriers.
“I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction, to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic, and help bring the People’s Republic to an even higher level,” the US leader wrote in a social media post.
The US and China are weighing a potential framework whereby each country identifies some $30 billion in goods on which tariffs could be eased without threatening national security interests, Reuters reported, citing four unnamed people familiar with the Trump administration’s objectives. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
Rubio also indicated in the Fox News interview that the US would push China to help conclude the war in Iran, as negotiations on a peace deal continue to bedevil the White House.
“We hope to convince them to play a more active role in getting Iran to walk away from what they’re doing now in the Persian Gulf,” Rubio said, adding he believed it was in China’s “interest to resolve this” due to Asia’s heavy energy dependence on the region, the possibility Chinese ships could continue to be targeted, and the risk that the conflict could further weigh on the global economy.
The two leaders have met at least six times over the past decade — typically on the sidelines of major multilateral summits — although they have also visited each other’s nations.
While in Beijing, Trump will take part in a state banquet with Xi Thursday evening. On Friday, he will meet with the Chinese leader again for a photo session, followed by a tea gathering and then lunch, before departing from Beijing in the afternoon.
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Published on May 14, 2026