EVERY week that passes without a face-to-face meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping gives fresh grievances time to accumulate.
That growing list is testing both sides’ ability to keep ties steady between the world’s top economies.
In the past few days, China has launched retaliatory probes into US trade practices, while a bipartisan group of American senators visited Taiwan to press for more spending to deter a Chinese invasion of the chip hub.
As Trump’s war in Iran continues to disrupt global commerce crucial to China’s growth, Beijing on Tuesday issued a joint call with Pakistan for an immediate ceasefire.
As those tensions build ahead of a much-anticipated leaders’ summit delayed to mid-May, the White House has signalled its intent to keep ties steady.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday said Cabinet officials will travel to China in the coming weeks, a move that could reassure Beijing after officials previously signalled dissatisfaction with Washington’s last-minute preparations.
Such visits would build on trade talks Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer held recently with Chinese vice-premier He Lifeng in Paris. Any visit to Beijing by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been twice sanctioned by China, could be considered another olive branch from both sides.
“The relationship between the United States and China has been remarkably stable in the months since the Busan meeting,” said Joe Mazur, a senior analyst at consulting firm Trivium China, referring to the October summit that sealed a tariff truce.
“The longer the two leaders go without talking, the more risk of a return to the ugliest days of the trade war.”
For its part, Beijing has shown commitment to the summit by emphasising the “irreplaceable” role of head-of-state diplomacy.
Hours before the probes into US trade practices were announced, China’s commerce minister urged Greer to avoid “vicious competition” and implement the consensus reached at the last leaders’ meeting in South Korea.
The conflict in the Middle East now appears to be the biggest source of uncertainty.
When Trump delayed his visit to China, he cited the need to stay in Washington to focus on US military operations in Iran.
The war is now in its second month, and showing few signs of ending anytime soon.
Greer on Tuesday downplayed the prospect that the conflict could delay talks further, saying preparations for the summit are on track.
“The Chinese want stability. We want stability. I actually see a positive agenda with China going forward,” Greer said on Bloomberg Surveillance.
Asked if he needed to meet his Chinese counterparts again before the summit, he said it would not be necessary, contrary to Leavitt’s suggestion the day before.
Trump and Xi are expected to meet four times this year, including at two leaders’ summits both nations are hosting in the final months of 2026.
Any further delay in the Republican leader’s trip to Beijing – the first by a US president in nearly a decade – would take the momentum out of that schedule.
“It would be diplomatically awkward for President Trump to delay the summit a second time, and delaying again could also disrupt the cadence of meetings potentially taking place later in the year,” said Brian Hart, deputy director of the China Power Project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
“That would potentially undermine the relative stability achieved in Busan.”
Taiwan remains a flashpoint, with Xi this week inviting the chairwoman of the island’s main opposition party to China for the first time in a decade.
That meeting will give the Chinese leader a chance to press Cheng Li-wun over a special military budget President Lai Ching-te is trying to to pass, in part to buy more weapons from Washington.
Chinese officials are wary of further US arms sales, an issue Xi raised directly with Trump in a February phone call during which he urged the United States to proceed with “utmost caution”.
The Chinese Communist Party considers the self-ruled island its own territory despite never having ruled it.
Still, China has been measured in responding to fresh trade tensions, illustrating the mutual desire to prevent any rupture.
Beijing cast its latest probes as countermeasures to the United States’ so-called Section 301 investigations, initiated by the Trump administration to lay the groundwork for replacing tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court in February.
The court ruling removed Trump’s 10% so-called reciprocal tariff on Chinese goods, as well as a separate 10% levy over fentanyl.
Although the Trump administration has since moved to impose a 10% flat global tariff, overall US levies on China remain below pre-ruling levels.
“This reflects the current pattern of China-US economic interaction: whenever the United States provokes, China strikes back resolutely – and we mean what we say,” said Wu Xinbo, director at Fudan University’s Centre for American Studies.
The latest moves, however, underscore a widening gap in how the two sides interpret Washington’s actions. — Bloomberg
Nectar Gan writes for Bloomberg. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
