WASHINGTON—Over the past year, US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping established an uneasy pause in hostilities—not a true détente, but a temporary stability. For now, both sides continue to test one another’s red lines, seeking to gain as much ground as possible, but also to avoid triggering escalatory reactions.
This fragile pause cannot go on indefinitely. On Thursday at the White House, the two leaders will hold their third in-person meeting in a little less than a year, and each side will seek to extend the pause in ways that advance its own interests. But several issues on the agenda could eventually prove to be fracture points that break the current period of relative stability.
Diplomatic framework
Beijing is trying to wrap the Trump administration in a diplomatic framework that Chinese leaders hope will constrain US actions and make Washington more predictable. When the leaders last met, in Beijing in May, China pushed what it called “constructive strategic stability.” According to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, this means the two sides should “extend the cooperation list, create more positive agendas, and at the same time narrow the list of problems and manage various risks and hidden dangers.” This requires “the US side to handle Taiwan-related issues with extra prudence,” he added. In other words, Beijing wants Washington to stop criticizing China and refrain from actions that antagonize it.
Beijing had tried a similar approach with the Obama administration when it pitched “new type of great power relations” over a decade ago. When the United States acts in ways Beijing opposes, Chinese leaders want to be able to declare those moves a violation of the agreed terms for US-China relations, and then use that to box Washington in. But there is a problem for China with this approach. Practically no one on the US side pays attention to this language. Few outside the core China-watcher circles are even aware it exists.
Meanwhile, on the US side, the Trump administration has been telling everyone except China that its aim for the current pause is to buy time to unwind China’s dominance over rare earth supply chains. Once that is unwound, the administration plans to revert to tough action against China. Beijing has picked up on that approach and is working to prevent the unwinding.
China also likely wants to use this meeting to set the conditions for future meetings. Xi will likely push for Trump to visit China in November for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders’ Meeting. If Trump makes that trip, the two sides have already agreed that Xi would reciprocate by attending the Group of Twenty (G20) Miami summit in December. That would lock in leader-level summitry through the end of 2026, giving China a degree of the predictability it is seeking, because Trump would likely avoid actions that could potentially disrupt either visit. In effect, Beijing is hoping that the promise of future diplomatic meetings will achieve what its “constructive strategic stability” language so far has not.
AI competition and safety
In the past few days, artificial intelligence (AI) has shot to the top of the US-China agenda. The United States and China are locked in an intense AI competition. Both sides see AI as a strategic technology that will impact the overall power balance across both the economic and security domains. Both sides are concerned about safety risks, but they see those risks differently, making collaboration difficult.
The top two US complaints about China’s approach to AI are distillation—Chinese firms using US models to train their own—and the possibility that rogue actors could use China’s models in dangerous ways. Earlier this month, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, together with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency, issued a public advisory accusing six Chinese AI companies of using US frontier models to train their own, inappropriately “distilling” US proprietary know-how in ways that undermine fair competition and could constitute intellectual property theft. The Trump administration is reportedly considering action against those companies. In July, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated, “We are finding watermarks of our US large language models on many of the Chinese models, and that’s unacceptable,” and that, if there is indeed intellectual property theft, “we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft.” Meanwhile, on the Hill, there is a bipartisan and bicameral “Remote Access Security Act” that, if enacted, would cut off the third-country data center loopholes Chinese companies use to access US compute to train those same models.
Washington also wants China’s AI companies to adopt better safety guardrails, share more information about the safety parameters they are using, and provide more transparency around how their models perform in pre-release safety testing. Both US and Chinese models incorporate guardrails—for example, they may refuse questions around how to build a biological weapon or, in Chinese models, adhere to Beijing’s censorship guidelines. But China’s safeguards are often much less robust than their US counterparts, and they are more susceptible to disruption. Washington is worried that rogue actors could misuse Chinese AI to carry out cyberattacks, develop biological weapons, or help launch other operations that US models are designed to avoid.
Beijing views US complaints about diffusion and guardrails as an attempt to hinder China’s AI development. Chinese leaders have their own AI safety concerns, which do not point to a clear path forward on safety collaboration with the United States. Their top concern is that AI models could be a threat to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule domestically. Earlier this month, China’s Minister of State Security Chen Yixin issued an extraordinary article laying out those concerns in detail. The top concern:
- “Various hostile forces and individuals with ulterior motives [could] abuse generative artificial intelligence technologies such as deepfake audio and video, AI-generated text and images, and intelligent online trolls to fabricate political rumors, spread harmful information, and incite confrontational sentiments at low cost and in large quantities, waging a propaganda war and a cognitive war against us, directly threatening our political security, institutional security, and ideological security.”
This is code for the United States deploying AI against the CCP. A secondary but related concern is that US AI companies could use their models—particularly Claude Mythos and GPT-5.5-Cyber—to attack China’s “critical information infrastructure.”
There is some overlap of concerns. Both the US and China, for example, appear to worry that rogue actors could use AI models for malicious action that neither nation would support, such as cyberattacks that bring down the global economy or developing and releasing a bioweapon with global impact. However, that narrow list of shared concerns does not yet point to a clear path forward to address it. Thus far, it has produced some pre-summit jockeying but no clear plan of action. In lieu of something larger, Washington has proposed that the two sides establish a “notification mechanism” so they at least each know who to call to flag dangerous AI events with national security impacts. Washington is threatening action on distillation in a bid to bring China to the table on US priorities. China is threatening reprisals if the US acts on those threats. Xi is reportedly planning to bring Chinese AI company executives with him to the state dinner, and Trump is doing the same. The most likely outcome is continued positioning throughout the summit and—at best—an agreement to keep working toward a more constructive dialogue on AI.
Taiwan
On his way back from Beijing in May, Trump’s comments to reporters on Air Force One constituted an extraordinary deviation from long-standing US policy on Taiwan. He insinuated that Taiwan’s current leadership is pushing for independence, a line that Beijing deploys but is not supported by facts on the ground. He also declared that he is discussing pending US arms sales to Taiwan with Xi. When pressed on the Reagan administration’s 1982 assurance that the United States would determine arm sales based on security needs without consulting Beijing, Trump replied that the “1980s is a long way … that’s a big, far distance away,” adding, “So what am I going to do, say, I don’t want to talk to you about it because I have an agreement that was signed in 1982?” Trump also stated that “I think the last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles away.”
For China, those comments amount to a major US concession. Trump indicated he is willing to give Beijing a say in US arms sales to Taiwan, a break from more than forty years of stability. And there are immediate implications: There is a major arms package awaiting White House approval. Xi will likely aim to box Trump in even further, such as by securing the US president’s promise to hold the pending sale until next year or even later. If Trump concedes, that risks eroding deterrence and making the Taiwan Strait less safe. If Xi feels that he has the upper hand to move on Taiwan, the possibility of a US-China conflict could increase.
Critical minerals
Critical mineral exports are the chokepoint Beijing is using to constrain the United States. The Trump administration is racing to bring new capacity online, but that process takes time. When the presidents met last fall in Busan, South Korea, and negotiated a trade truce, China agreed to pause new export controls on rare earths and other critical minerals bound for the United States. However, the terms have been murky from the start. China’s version of its commitment is less detailed than the Trump administration’s version. Earlier this year, in private conversations, senior US officials reported that most US buyers were receiving their shipments as promised and, in the administration’s view, China was living up to its side of the deal. That sentiment has changed in the past couple of months.
In July, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) added foreign-origin advanced robots and connected power inverters to the list of products banned in the US market due to the national security risks they pose to US communications infrastructure. China is the main exporter of those products. In August, China took action against a broad array of US companies, claiming the moves were a response to the FCC rules and other 2026 US measures. Shortly thereafter, China’s rare earth exporters began canceling shipments to the United States. Both sides blame the other for violating the Busan truce. Trump and Xi will be aiming to get this back on track, with each side trying to secure maximum concessions from the other side at minimal cost. If the pattern from the previous two meetings holds, then the United States will declare that China made a solid, detailed commitment to restart rare earth exports, while China will issue squishy diplomatic language, and the jockeying will continue.
Trade and investment
Two major economic announcements are expected from the Washington summit: extending the trade truce and dropping tariffs. The current truce is set to expire in early November, and both sides have an incentive to extend it. While there are divergent views in Washington regarding how far to extend the truce, the two presidents will likely agree to a six-month extension, which, if they meet again at APEC and the G20, they could revisit in December.
Tariff reductions are almost certain. The two sides are referring to this as the “30 by 30” deliverable: each side will remove existing tariffs on thirty billion dollars of imported goods. This announcement is so widely expected that if it is derailed, it will indicate something has gone horribly wrong.
China may also announce purchase agreements: soybeans and Boeing airplanes are reportedly on the table. Beijing already announced a set of purchases in May, but it can increase the numbers or formalize them in September (effectively getting credit twice).
Detainees
If there’s one wild card in these negotiations, it’s the potential release of detainees in China. Detainees are a personal priority for Trump—and Beijing knows this. The US president raised detainee cases at all three leader-level meetings over the past year. On July 4, Beijing responded by releasing Pastor Ezra Jin, a Chinese national detained and jailed as part of China’s 2025 crackdown on underground churches.
There remain several high-profile detainees who are priorities for the United States, including Ekpar Asat, who was imprisoned over a decade ago after he visited the United States to participate in a State Department exchange program. (My Atlantic Council colleague Rayhan Asat has been a tireless advocate for her brother’s release.) In Congress, both parties and both houses are pushing on his case, as well as others. Releasing high-profile detainees is a good way for Beijing to build goodwill—and goodwill is hard to come by in US-China relations these days.
