President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will hold their highly anticipated summit in Beijing on May 14-15, following a delay that brought fresh uncertainty to relations between the world's largest economies.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the rescheduled dates on Wednesday and said that Xi would visit Washington at a date later this year.
Trump was due to visit China later this month but the US president postponed the meeting to remain in Washington and focus his attention on the war with Iran. The war brought fresh strains to US-China ties, even as the two economies sought to navigate lingering issues from a trade détente struck last year and simmering tensions over Taiwan. Iran is a major trading partner for China, the world's biggest crude importer.
Leavitt said the administration has “always estimated approximately four-to-six weeks” for the conflict when asked if the new dates indicated Trump would look to wind down the war by that point. And she sidestepped a question about whether concluding the war was a precondition for rescheduling the summit.
“There was a discussion about the rescheduling of the meeting between the president and President Xi. President Xi understood that it's very important for the president to be here throughout these combat operations right now. He understood, obviously, the request to postpone and accepted it, which is why we have new dates on the books,” Leavitt said.
While US officials downplayed any fallout from delaying the summit, insisting it had nothing to do with trade ties or China's relationship with Iran, the postponement highlighted how the Middle East conflict has upended Trump's economic and foreign policy agendas. Trump had previously warned the summit could be pushed back if China did not commit to helping secure the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for energy supplies effectively shuttered by the war.
Trump has generally struck an upbeat tone with China, challenging the limits of his own Republican Party's appetite for closer ties with a country that many hawks see as America's chief geopolitical adversary.
Still, Trump and Xi have much to discuss. The rescheduled meeting will pose a fresh test of how comfortable Trump and Xi are with the status quo on trade, US support for Taiwan and whether there will be any fallout for the US strikes on Iran that spurred a spike in oil prices.
Officials from the two countries, including US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, met in Paris in March, a gathering intended to lay the groundwork for the summit. Both sides expressed a willingness to continue to stabilize their relationship after a tit-for-tat tariff war that saw levies surge in 2025 and spark fears of a global economic downturn. The countries are discussing a possible trade enforcement panel to help address disputes, a mechanism Greer has called “a US-China Board of Trade.”
The summit will be the first face-to-face for Trump and Xi since the US Supreme Court ruling in February struck down the country-by-country tariffs the US president imposed on trading partners, including China, using emergency powers. The US president has vowed to rebuild that tariff wall through other authorities.
Trump has already imposed an across-the-board 10% levy as a stopgap measure, effectively lowering the rate on Chinese goods for now. Greer has launched Section 301 probes, however, to establish the case for tariffs on countries, including China, that may ultimately replace the stopgap levies set to expire in July.
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