Inside Trump’s two-day Chinese Visit: Is this the end of the trade wars?
- Marijan Hassan - Tech Journalist
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
President Donald Trump concluded a high-stakes, two-day state visit to Beijing on Friday, May 15, 2026, wrapping up a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping that leaned heavily on diplomatic pageantry and corporate star power but left analysts questioning the depth of its tangible breakthroughs.
Seeking to stabilize a volatile economic relationship caught between intense AI competition and geopolitical friction, Trump brought a delegation of the world's most powerful business leaders. The guest list featured tech aristocracy, including Apple’s outgoing CEO Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, Micron’s Sanjay Mehrotra, and Cisco’s Chuck Robbins.
The last-minute addition: Jensen Huang joins the flight
The biggest pre-summit drama involved Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. Initially omitted from the official roster to avoid awkward friction over tightening U.S. chip export bans, Trump reportedly called Huang directly mid-week after seeing media reports of his absence. Huang flew to Alaska to board Air Force One during a refuelling stop
Red lines and reassurances
With Washington and Beijing locked in a race for artificial intelligence supremacy, tech policy topped the closed-door agenda. Neither leader announced a rollback of the aggressive semiconductor tariffs or export blockades currently squeezing hardware manufacturers, but the summit established a fragile truce:
The Anti-Rogue Protocol: U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed that Washington and Beijing agreed to set up a formal protocol to prevent non-state actors and rogue entities from acquiring advanced frontier AI models.
The Nvidia Greenlight: Reports surfaced during the summit that Washington had greenlit the sale of Nvidia's second-most powerful AI chip to ten vetted Chinese firms. However, no deliveries have been made, and the administration is mulling an executive order requiring domestic frontier labs to submit future models for national security reviews.
Pageantry, promises, and verbal commitments
The two-day summit was rich in the grand theatricality Trump famously favors. The itinerary included a rare tour of the historic Temple of Heaven, making Trump only the second sitting U.S. president to visit the site since Gerald Ford in 1975, and a walk through the cloistered Zhongnanhai imperial gardens, where Xi reportedly promised to send Trump seeds for the White House rose garden.
Trump took to Fox News and social media to herald the trip as an unmitigated triumph, claiming the two superpowers had "settled a lot of different problems" and secured multi-billion-dollar verbal commitments:
Aerospace: Trump announced that China had verbally agreed to purchase 200 Boeing 737 Max jets, a significant scaling up of an earlier, stalled 50-aircraft deal.
Agriculture: Beijing offered commitments to resume large-scale purchases of American soybeans, offering a buffer to U.S. agricultural sectors.
Geopolitics: Amid ongoing maritime friction, Iranian news outlets reported that Tehran had softened its stance on checking commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz following direct diplomatic interventions from Beijing during the summit.
The long horizon
Despite the triumphant rhetoric from the American delegation, market reactions remained muted, with Boeing stock dipping 8% over the course of the visit due to a lack of signed, binding contracts. As Air Force One departed Beijing, the summit left the tech sector with a temporary reprieve from escalating trade hostilities.
While President Xi emphasized that China's "great rejuvenation" could coexist with Washington's economic goals, the underlying architectural battle over global technology leadership, rare-earth mineral processing, and algorithmic dominance remains entirely unresolved.
