Trump to Greet Xi at Military Base as US and China Weigh Tariff Relief
Chinese President Xi Jinping will make a state visit to the United States next week — the first by a Chinese leader in more than a decade — for talks with President Donald Trump expected to cover trade, tariffs, artificial intelligence and access to rare earth minerals.
Senior administration officials, briefing reporters on Friday, said Mr Trump will personally greet Mr Xi when his aircraft lands at Joint Base Andrews, the military base outside Washington, on Wednesday. The arrangement is unusual: the president generally receives foreign leaders at the White House rather than at the airbase.
The formal programme begins on Thursday, when Mr Trump and first lady Melania Trump welcome Mr Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, at an arrival ceremony held indoors on the State Floor of the White House. The two leaders will then review troops in the Rose Garden before holding closed-door talks.
Mrs Trump and Peng Liyuan will take part in a separate engagement while their husbands meet. Officials did not release details of that programme during the briefing call.
On Thursday evening, the visiting couple will be guests of honour at a state dinner in the East Room, hosted by the president and the first lady. Both leaders are scheduled to deliver remarks.
“Thousands of people would love to be at that dinner,” Mr Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday. He noted that a 1,000-seat ballroom he is building at the White House will not be ready in time for the event, describing the dinner as “a very tough ticket” and adding that he had told friends they could not attend.
Several technology executives are on the guest list, the White House said, among them Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, Michael Dell of Dell Technologies, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Citigroup chief executive Jane Fraser and Tim Cook of Apple.
On Friday, Mr Xi and Peng Liyuan are due back at the White House for a private tea with the Trumps, who will then take them on a tour of the National Archives, which houses some of the United States’ founding documents, as the country marks its 250th anniversary. Mr Xi will depart for Joint Base Andrews after the tour.
On trade, US officials said the two governments may be prepared to ease tariffs on a narrow band of non-strategic goods in a way that would benefit both sides. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House, did not elaborate.
They said they did not expect Washington to be ready to relax export controls in order to increase the flow of rare earth minerals — critical components in products ranging from smartphones to fighter jets — onto the global market. Maintaining an acceptable flow of such minerals would be discussed, the officials said, but a deal trading US export control relief for minerals was unlikely.
Separately, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is scheduled to meet Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng in New York over the weekend to discuss a range of economic issues, according to a person familiar with the plans who spoke on condition of anonymity because the details were not public. Artificial intelligence will be a focus of those talks, the person said.
In Beijing, China’s commerce ministry announced that Mr He would lead a delegation to the United States from Saturday to Wednesday for economic and trade consultations. China’s stockpiles of rare earth minerals, over which it holds a near-monopoly of global supply, are also expected to feature in the discussions. Beijing has previously used that dominance as leverage in trade negotiations.
A state visit is the highest form of diplomatic reception the United States extends to a foreign leader, and the scale of the programme — an airport welcome, a troop review, a state dinner and a private tea — reflects the weight both capitals are placing on the engagement.
