What’s the point of the Xi visit?

oments before President Xi Jinping climbed down the steps of his aircraft to be greeted by Donald Trump, US marines were filmed on their hands and knees smoothing out the red carpet, Chinese officials looking down from the top of the steps. It was an uncomfortable image, ridiculed on social media for the symbolism of kowtowing to the emperor. But it set the tone for a summit which so far has been heavy on pomp and ceremony, rich in platitudes, but with very little in the way of substance.

A strong diplomatic case can be made for political fawning – where the power dynamics are lopsided against you, and if there’s a chance of a reasonable payback. After all, it’s what Trump’s democratic Western allies do a lot of the time in order to keep Trump on side, fend off his punitive tariffs and tame his caprice. But even allowing for Trump’s soft spot for autocrats and political theatre, his treatment of Xi has so far been cringemaking, the returns so minimal that it rather begs the question: what was the point?

Their main achievement during the first day of the summit appears to be a two-month extension of a trade war truce. This was struck last November in order to end tit-for-tat sanctions that saw China weaponise its control over the global supply of rare earths, essential for high-technology products, in retaliation for sky-high US tariffs.

They also agreed that they should keep in touch over the threat to human existence from artificial intelligence – or ‘super intelligence’ as Trump calls it – while seemingly also agreeing that there was nothing much worth talking about. Xi said, ‘humans must remain in control over AI technology’, while the US president called it a ‘big topic’ of discussions, saying he and and his Chinese counterpart were happy to ‘leave it exactly where it is’.

Trump met Xi in person at the foot of that smoothed-out red carpet – the first time that a sitting American president has greeted a foreign leader in Washington in person for 64 years. Xi never made the effort when the US president visited Beijing in May, during which the pomp and ceremony were much more low key. The two leaders began their bilateral meeting yesterday morning after a military performance that involved an ear-splitting flyover by a B-2 Spirit bomber and four F-22 Raptor fighter jets.

At the start of their meeting, Xi appealed for ‘healthy’ competition with the US and ‘not a wrestle in which one side wins or loses’, Trump said he had forged ‘a truly great friendship’ with the Chinese leader. The visit comes amid fresh rumours about Xi’s health – the 74-year-old skipped a dinner during the recent BRICS summit in Delhi and was rumoured to have been hospitalised on his return to Beijing. But in a Truth Social post, the US President wrote that Xi looked ‘strong. Vibrant and fit’.

At a lavish White House dinner last night, Trump said that the US and China had ‘never gotten along better’, while Xi said he and the US president had ‘sincere, in-depth’ exchanges and came to an understanding on many issues, though he did not elaborate. He said that Trump’s goal of ‘making America great again’ and his own commitment to ‘national rejuvenation’ were not necessarily incompatible. ‘These two goals are both ambitious and can surely be mutually reinforcing,’ he said.

Xi also served up some pandas – two of them, to be sent to Atlanta Zoo ‘in a few days’ as an ‘envoy of friendship’. Panda diplomacy has long been a feature of Chinese statecraft. They are rented, rather than given, since as with rare earths China has a monopoly and can recall them at any time – as it did in 2024 when four were taken back from Atlanta amid rising US tensions. They should beware of becoming too comfortable in their new American home. Trump presented Xi with a statue of a bald eagle, a national symbol of US, which he said was designed by himself and first lady Melania.

During the banquet, the two leaders sat at the top table alongside US technology leaders, including Elon Musk (Tesla), Jason Huang (Nvidia), Lisa Su (AMD) and Tim Cook (Apple). They represented the cutting edge in American technology leadership. No Chinese business people attended, since Xi reportedly chose not to bring a delegation with him to Washington, after initially indicating that he would do so. It was not immediately clear why, but many of China’s top companies are blacklisted for their links to the Chinese military.

Earlier, hundreds of human rights activists marched in Washington, protesting against Xi’s visit and his repression against ethnic minorities and dissidents, and included Hong Kongers, Uyghurs and Tibetans. On the eve of the summit, Andy Burnham had reportedly implored Trump to bring up the case of imprisoned Hong Kong dissident Jimmy Lai, though it is unclear whether he did so. There were many elephants in the ballroom last night – from the Iran war, where China has reportedly supplied targeting data to the Islamic regime, to Beijing’s support for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, US support for (and China’s aggression against) Taiwan, China’s alleged copying of America’s AI models and China’s mercantilism, over-production and record-breaking trade surplus.

There is still a day of this summit to go, so more substance could emerge. During his banquet speech, Trump went off script and pointed to the construction of the new White House ballroom. ‘If we had it, we would have way more than 1,000 people,’ he boasted, inviting his guests to take a look. It is not clear whether any of them took up the offer. If they did, it could well have been the most interesting thing they’d done all day.

RE: These things are all symbolic. Always have been.

Yep, I don’t know what was accomplished. But I have my own read of the visit.

The readout landed last night. Trump and Xi extended the trade truce by two months, to January 10. No tariff cuts. No firm commitments on rare earths. No chips deal. U.S. officials told reporters that Chinese rare earth deliveries are still falling short of what Beijing promised at Busan.

Taiwan and Iran were discussed without resolution.

Two more summits, in Shenzhen and Miami, are penciled in before year-end. China set the timer at sixty days.

Think about what that number means. A one-year extension would have told you Beijing was comfortable, that it believed the relationship was stable enough to put the weapon down for a while.

Sixty days says the opposite. Xi wants Washington back at the table before the new Congress is seated, with the export licenses still throttled, the deliveries still short, and the deadline landing nine days into a new year. That is a man who knows his leverage is worth more when it is renewed often.

And here is the part almost nobody in the coverage is saying. Washington has been playing the same game, on a bigger board, all year.

Step back to January 3. U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, and within days Washington announced it would take control of Venezuelan oil sales and hold the revenue in U.S. Treasury accounts. China had been buying roughly 80% of Venezuela’s crude exports, about 400,000 barrels a day, most of it disguised as Brazilian or Malaysian cargo to get around sanctions. After January 3, those shipments stopped. Chinese cargoes were returned or diverted.

Seven weeks later, the war with Iran began. Before the conflict, China was buying roughly 90% of Iran’s oil exports, which supplied about 13% of everything China imports. Between Iran and Venezuela, close to a fifth of China’s crude came from two countries that Washington has now effectively taken off the board.

Put simply, in the same year Beijing has been using rare earths to squeeze Washington, Washington has been using oil to squeeze Beijing. Two of China’s three discounted-crude lifelines are gone. The small independent refiners that make up a quarter of China’s refining capacity were built on those discounts, and their pricing model is broken.

Beijing can replace the volumes from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Russia. It cannot replace the price, and it cannot replace the political relationships that came with the barrels.

And Washington now has a unit whose whole job is making sure this keeps happening.

Beijing set a short clock because it wants to keep pressure on Washington. Washington accepted a short clock because it does not need a long one. Every week the truce holds is a week the U.S. keeps building: the Greenland deal, the scandium mine, the tungsten line, the stockpile, the refineries. Every week the Venezuelan and Iranian oil stays off China’s books is a week Beijing’s refiners pay more.

Both sides are using the truce to reload. The difference is that Washington’s reloading is permanent. A mine, once built, does not un-build when the truce expires. An oil relationship, once severed, does not restore itself because a summit went well.

So here is what I expect over the next sixty days ( for what it’s worth ).

The pace of deals is going to pick up. Every incentive Washington has points the same way: a January 10 deadline that rewards positions taken now and punishes positions taken later, a midterm election in five weeks that rewards announcements, and a set of agencies, the Economic Defense Unit, the Office of Strategic Capital, the Export-Import Bank, that were built to move money quickly and now have a reason to.

In the last ten days alone the Trump admin locked up Greenland, banned tungsten scrap exports, cleared Korean tungsten shipments, and brought the largest commodity trader on earth into a $10 billion stockpile. That is the pace with the truce expiring in November.

With it expiring in January and an election in between, I expect it to accelerate: more equity stakes, more offtake agreements, more loans to mines in allied countries, more price floors, and at least one more security arrangement on the Greenland model.

The companies on the receiving end of that spending are known. They are the ones with a loan, a permit, or a customer already in hand, because the government does not have time to build from scratch in sixty days. It funds what is ready.

BOTTOM LINE: Xi came to Washington holding the only card that matters. Washington let him keep it for sixty more days, because it is busy building a deck of its own.

“Plus many of these buildings are “tofu dreg” construction. The building contractors use shoddy or downright fake building materials and bill for good supplies. Then they take the money and run.”

I think you’re confusing the PRC and Taiwan in this area. China has really tightened up its building and construction codes. Most of the dangerous buildings built in the 1990’s have already been demolished. The shoddy private contractors are imprisoned or executed.

This is not to say that the buildings are super top-notch. They were built to last 50 to 60 years. Many use seawater in the concrete mix, which causes the rebar to rust over time. But the buildings will be safe to live in for decades.

The real issue currently, as you said, is overbuilding. They have far too many homes built. The property market has crashed by up to 60%, more in places. They keep building new units as a jobs program, and that has obliterated the secondhand market

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