President Trump is in China for a two-day summit with President Xi Jinping. The summit begins Thursday morning and runs through Friday.
“We’re the two superpowers,” Trump told reporters as he departed the White House on Tuesday to fly to Beijing. “We’re the strongest nation on Earth in terms of military. China’s considered second.”
The president arrived in China’s capital at about 8 p.m. Beijing time, or 8 a.m. Eastern. He’s accompanied by a group of American business leaders, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk.
The agenda will range from tariffs to artificial intelligence as President Trump also seeks to sign deals with China to buy more American soybeans, beef and aircraft, saying he’ll be talking with Xi about trade “more than anything else.”
He also wants to begin establishing a Board of Trade with China to address differences between the countries.
But the battle with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz is expected to come up as well because Beijing is a strong ally of the regime in Tehran.
Still, Trump said, “We have a lot of things to discuss. I wouldn’t say Iran is one of them, to be honest with you, because we have Iran very much under control.”
President Xi is also expected to bring up U.S. military support for Taiwan. China is upset with the U.S. for planning to sell weapons to the independent island nation because the Chinese communist regime wants to take over Taiwan and claim it as its own territory.
As the world’s leading chipmaker, Taiwan is a key to the AI race, and the U.S. has reportedly imported more goods so far this year from Taiwan than China.
China’s abysmal record on human rights could also come up during the brief summit. President Trump has reportedly said he plans to address the issue of an imprisoned Chinese pastor named Ezra Jin Mingri.
