Xi Approaches Trump Summit as China's Trade Momentum Strengthens

As Xi Jinping and Donald Trump prepare to meet, the ancient calculus of negotiation reasserts itself: those who arrive at the table with strength in hand speak with a different voice than those who arrive with need. China's trade sector, performing with unusual vigor in the weeks before the summit, has handed Beijing a quiet but consequential form of leverage — the ability to wait, to hold, and to choose. What unfolds between the world's two largest economies will not merely settle a bilateral dispute; it will send signals that reorder supply chains, reshape tariff regimes, and test whether ec