What Xi Jinping wants from his summit with Donald Trump

When Xi Jinping arrives in Washington this week for his first visit to the US capital in 11 years, China's leader is expected to focus on five areas in his talks with President Donald Trump.

Xi's most urgent goal will be to extend a trade truce that the two leaders sealed in the South Korean city of Busan last October after a brief but fierce tariff war, Chinese scholars and analysts say.

China's leader is also expected to discuss AI safety and how to end the Iran war, as well as agreements to buy US soyabeans or Boeing aircraft. And Xi is set to push hard against Washington's support for Taiwan, over which Beijing claims sovereignty.

But his most important aim will be to preserve the détente between China and the US that the two sides described as "constructive strategic stability" when Xi hosted Trump in Beijing in May. In the relative diplomatic quiet since then, China has accelerated efforts to upgrade the nation's technology to compete with the US and revive a domestic economy that is suffering from a five-year property bust.

"'Stable' by itself already means 'constructive'," said an international relations scholar in Beijing. "Because in 2024 and 2025, we did not expect that there would be stability between China and the United States."

The number one goal for Xi will be to extend the Busan truce . China's global trade surplus, which helped spark a trade war during Trump's first term, is on track to exceed 2025's record $1.2tn, even though its direct exports to the US have fallen in recent years.

After Busan, the US cut tariffs on China, but the agreement is set to expire on November 10. If the truce is not extended, the two sides could reimpose higher tariffs and stringent export controls that were frozen last year.

Senior US and Chinese officials discussed extending the truce at the weekend but did not reach agreement, according to people familiar with the talks.

Washington believes China has not sufficiently lived up to its promise to ease export controls on rare earths critical to high-tech manufacturing and is threatening to extend the truce for only six months. China wants it to run until the end of Trump's term.

China has previously agreed to buy 25mn tonnes of soyabeans and an additional $17bn of other US agricultural products annually.

There is speculation Xi will bring a delegation of high-powered Chinese business leaders to Washington. That would mirror Trump's entourage in Beijing in May, which included Apple's Tim Cook, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Tesla's Elon Musk.