Transactional. Distrustful. Limited in ambition. The upcoming summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping is shaping up as a diplomatic negotiation in which both sides believe they hold the stronger hand and major breakthroughs are unlikely. Yet what the two leaders say, and what they avoid saying, will reverberate across the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and the wider contest between democratic and authoritarian systems.
CEPA experts spoke with journalists to explain what to expect.
What Each Side Wants
Neither Washington nor Beijing is coming to the table looking to step down from their current position. With only a recent pause since the 2025 tariff escalation and now mounting economic pressure from conflict in the Middle East, “neither side is looking to build détente. So this is a transactional meeting,” says James Lewis, a distinguished fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). “Both sides think they’re coming from a position of strength, and so there’s not going to be any desire on the Chinese side to make concessions, unless it’s in exchange for something like a relaxation of controls on artificial intelligence, which Xi prizes highly, or perhaps something on Taiwan.”
Lewis emphasizes viewers should expect familiar deliverables: Boeing aircraft purchases, agricultural orders, perhaps adjustments on AI exports. Trump may press Xi to help isolate Iran. Xi will press Trump on Taiwan. Lewis predicts limited movement either way.
From Europe, expectations are calibrated downward. Reinhard Bütikofer, a former German member of the European Parliament and CEPA senior fellow, sees Trump as weaker than during his 2017 China visit. “We don’t expect Trump to either play hardball or to cut a real grand deal,” he says. The realistic outcome, in his view, is a prolongation of the trade truce reached in October 2025.
Taiwan in the Crosshairs
Taiwan looms largest. China is “foregrounding Taiwan in their approach to this meeting,” Bütikofer says, signaling that Beijing believes its hand on trade is strong enough to extract concessions on sovereignty.
He warns against any US shift in language from “we do not support Taiwanese independence” to “we oppose Taiwanese independence,” a change that would violate the third of the six assurances President Ronald Reagan gave Taipei in 1982. “That would be a home run. It would even be a Grand Slam for Xi Jinping,” he says.
Taiwan’s global importance to global technology supply chains, including semiconductors and other critical AI components, leads Lewis to be more sanguine. He believes Trump recognizes Taiwan is “too economically important, too strategically important, to give it back to the Chinese.”
Sarah Cook, founder of China Rights Analytics and Advising and author of Underreported China, argues that the artificial intelligence revolution strengthens Taipei’s hand. “You don’t really want critical parts of your tech supply chain, especially at this moment, being in the hands of Beijing,” she says.
The Russian Connection
The summit sits in the long shadow of the Beijing-Moscow axis. For the last 20 years, both countries have been growing increasingly close in terms of military, economic, and geopolitical vision, not only on their own borders but also in the Indo-Pacific, Central Asia, and beyond. Christopher Walker, CEPA’s vice president, notes that Xi and Vladimir Putin have met a reported 50 times since 2012, building what he calls “a shared consciousness on top-order issues.” That includes Chinese support for Russia’s war in Ukraine through dual-use exports of machine tools, chemicals, and gunpowder, alongside coordinated information operations against the democracies.
“Any notion of the US accomplishing a reverse Kissinger is a fantasy,” Walker says. If anything, the inverse has happened: a weakened Russia has chosen to side with China, Iran, and other authoritarian regimes against the United States and its natural allies.
Human Rights and Transnational Repression
Cook does not expect human rights to dominate the agenda, but she argues the issue offers Washington underused leverage. Trump has said he will raise the case of jailed Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai. Cook hopes he goes further, citing American citizens whose relatives have been imprisoned in China in apparent retaliation for their advocacy in the United States.
Cook also wants Trump to confront Xi on transnational repression. US prosecutors have documented Chinese agents undermining civil society on American soil. Most notably, Eileen Wang, the mayor of Aracdia, California, resigned after agreeing to plead guilty to acting as a foreign agent. “It really behooves the United States to say, look, I know this is going on,” Cook says. “Showing that you’re willing to raise it actually can create leverage.”
That economic grip travels with political conditions: Zambia abruptly postponed hosting RightsCon, one of the world’s largest internet-freedom conferences, just days after signing an economic agreement with Beijing that objected to Taiwanese civil-society participants, an episode Cook cites as evidence that Chinese transnational censorship is widening well beyond the usual Tibet, Xinjiang, and Falun Gong files.
The Technology Contest
Underlying everything is a sharpening technology contest. US export controls have slowed, but not stopped Chinese chipmaking, and Beijing’s DeepSeek now trains models on locally produced Huawei semiconductors. Lewis frames the dynamic bluntly: “It’s a replay of the 5G competition, and the result of that was the US got the revenue, the Chinese got the market share.”
Chinese industrial overcapacity will also press on the talks. “China makes more cars than the annual demand of the entire world,” Lewis noted that this is the product of a Chinese provincial subsidy machine that the World Trade Organization has been unable to discipline. Cook added that the global spread of Chinese AI models embeds Beijing’s censorship preferences far beyond China’s borders.
The experts explain how this contest for technological supremacy is global. China holds dominance over resource-rich African states that mine rare earths and ship them to China for processing. Bütikofer notes Beijing’s “quasi monopoly” gives it leverage over both African suppliers and the Western economies that depend on the finished inputs, with no comparable Chinese offer to help these countries build refining capacity of their own.
The Bigger Picture
The risk for the transatlantic alliance is that the summit reinforces what Walker calls Beijing’s “divide and conquer methodology.” European officials, already managing Trump’s tariffs, fear Washington will trade away shared interests for narrow commercial wins. “Transatlantic unity on China is the year’s story that’s gone,” Bütikofer concedes.
Walker urges a sharper framing. “Somehow in the recent past, we’ve slowly drifted away from the idea that we’re in a competition with China,” he says. “It’s a competition about the way the world will be ordered.” The summit will not settle that contest. At most, it will reveal which side currently believes it is winning.
Michael Newton is the Director for Communications and Information Systems at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
CEPA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, public policy institution. All opinions expressed are those of the author(s) alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
