Xi's Washington visit brings pageantry but little progress on key issues

The pageantry began on Wednesday at a military air base and continued through Thursday morning with honour guards and marching bands at the White House. President Donald Trump had rolled out every ceremonial flourish available to welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping to Washington. The public face of the summit gleamed with diplomatic warmth. Xi announced a gift of pandas to the United States and unveiled a new student exchange programme. "Let us keep advancing the cause of friendship between our two peoples and work together to build a better world," he said. Trump, in turn, spoke of discussions to come on "pressing issues concerning security, technology, and superintelligence"—his term for artificial intelligence—and suggested that decisions made during the visit could "promote peace and prosperity for decades and decades to come."

But beneath the ceremonial surface, the substance remained thin. Jennifer Welch, chief economic analyst for Bloomberg Economics, described the spectacle as "intentional pageantry to talk up the positive vibes of the summit." She saw it as Trump's preferred method of managing the US-China relationship: providing what he views as ballast for stability. Yet even in Xi's remarks at the White House, an undercurrent of tension surfaced. He invoked the "Thucydides trap," a theory holding that power shifts between nations tend to produce conflict. He called for "candid, in-depth and continued dialogue" and the ability to "seek common ground while shelving differences," language that acknowledged the gap between the two countries' positions rather than bridging it.

The history of recent negotiations offered little reason for optimism. When Trump and Xi met in Beijing in May, they agreed to establish boards of trade and investment to oversee economic interactions—and little else. On Wednesday of this week, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that a year-long trade truce, which had kept tariffs lower than they might otherwise have been, would be extended for two more months. Financial analysts expected another extension before the summit concluded, since neither side wanted to reignite the trade war that had erupted the previous year. Yet even this modest holding pattern masked deeper fractures. China had reneged on promises to purchase more American agricultural products and to increase sales of rare earth minerals to the United States. Meanwhile, China was monitoring whether Trump would follow through on a proposed weapons sale to Taiwan—a transaction that had been frozen for months.

The divergence on artificial intelligence was perhaps the starkest illustration of how differently the two nations approached the future. Robyn Klingler-Vida, a professor of political economy at Kings College London, explained that the United States sought agreements focused on existential risk and potentially slowing AI development, while China pursued acceleration and victory in the technological race. The contrast was so fundamental that it seemed to preclude meaningful compromise. A number of leading American AI executives had been invited to the formal state dinner scheduled for Thursday evening, a gesture many observers read as the US side displaying its current technological edge.

Miles Yu, who served as principal China policy planner and strategist to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during Trump's first term, offered a blunt assessment of the summit's prospects. "What China talks about is metaphysical and abstract," he told the BBC. "The United States wants to solve specific problems. These different approaches are not going to lead to any result." The observation captured a structural mismatch that no amount of pageantry could resolve. Xi was scheduled to depart on Friday afternoon. By then, observers suggested, the visit would likely be remembered for its ceremonial grandeur and its reaffirmation of stability rather than for any breakthrough on the issues that actually divided the two powers.