Washington, United States: When Xi Jinping arrived in the American capital for his first state visit in more than a decade, the welcome was built to be remembered. Donald Trump greeted the Chinese president in person at Joint Base Andrews, a courtesy rarely extended to a visiting leader, and followed it with cannon fire, a state dinner and a sculpted bald eagle presented as a gift. For Xi, the trappings of a full state visit carried a political message: that Washington now treats Beijing as something other than a problem to be contained.

The display drew criticism from both American parties, with opponents warning that the ceremonial treatment of a strategic rival amounted to a reward. The substance agreed beneath the spectacle was narrower than the staging implied. The single most concrete result of the visit was a short extension of the trade truce that had halted the tariff war of the previous year.

That truce had been due to lapse in November. According to the US Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, the two governments agreed to push it back to January 10, buying what he described as "more time to see what we can do on the economic front." The arrangement leaves the central questions — tariff levels, Chinese purchases of American goods, rare-earth supplies and technology restrictions — to a later round of bargaining rather than settling them.

The formula underpinning the thaw was set earlier in the year at a summit in Beijing, where the two leaders committed to building what they called a "constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability." Each word in that phrase is read on both sides as deliberate: a positive agenda rather than damage control, a relationship anchored at the level of the two leaders and measured over long horizons, and an emphasis on stability as both a direction and a limit.

The shift marks a departure from the posture Washington adopted after 2018, when the first Trump administration opened a tariff war, placed Huawei and other Chinese technology firms under sanctions, and urged multinational companies to adopt a "China+1" strategy — moving production out of China into a second base in Vietnam, India or Mexico — under the banner of decoupling.

Beijing responded by widening its trade across Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa, and by assembling a supply chain that runs from basic materials through to advanced equipment. Trade between the two economies fell by roughly 30 per cent in 2025 alone, according to the McKinsey Global Institute's 2026 update on the geometry of world trade, a contraction that has made the older language of separation harder to sustain.

On the American side, the business case for withdrawal has been thinning. Some of the best-known names in American technology, among them Apple's Tim Cook and Tesla's Elon Musk, have concluded that a clean break is not working. EnerVenue, a California battery maker, began mass production in Changzhou last week after abandoning a planned US$264 million plant in Kentucky. Washington has effectively shelved the "China+1" push, and the second Trump administration now casts China as a critical supplier and as the other half of the only bilateral relationship that truly matters.

Even the truce carries unfinished business. Bessent said on Wednesday that Beijing was meeting its commitment to buy 25 million tons of soybeans but was trailing on a pledge to purchase US$17 billion in other agricultural goods. American officials have also said deliveries of rare-earth minerals are falling short. Companies are left with the uncertainty they have come to expect: tariff rates stay lower for now, but investment decisions still have to be taken against a policy environment that can shift without warning.

Yet the summit should not be read as the beginning of a rapprochement, analysts who follow the relationship argued in the days after the two leaders met. The visit was stronger on symbolism than on substance, they noted, and it produced no clear breakthroughs on the disputes that divide the two powers. Alongside trade, the agenda is said to have covered Taiwan, technological restrictions, artificial intelligence, rare-earth minerals and the war with Iran, with little measurable progress in any of those areas.

On this reading, the extension of the trade agreement functions as a breathing space rather than a permanent settlement of the rivalry. It defers confrontation over rare-earth supplies, technological restrictions and tariffs, while the underlying disagreement between the two governments remains intact. Its real value lies in preventing individual disputes from reinforcing one another and producing a broader strategic crisis, a form of risk containment rather than resolution.

The most sensitive strand of the visit was Taiwan. According to China's official news agency, Xi pressed Trump on the island and said Beijing hoped Washington would "handle the Taiwan question with prudence." The same agency's English-language service reported that Xi hoped the United States would oppose Taiwanese independence — a formulation harder than Washington's long-standing position that it does not support independence.

American arms sales to the island remain the most combustible part of the question. Trump had previously placed a package of roughly US$14 billion in arms sales to Taiwan in abeyance, describing it as a negotiating instrument, and discussed the sales with Xi — a sequence American analysts viewed with deep scepticism. The danger, as regional observers have warned, lies less in any single disagreement than in the possibility of miscalculation: any military activity around the Taiwan Strait by either side could tip a political quarrel into direct conflict, with consequences far beyond the region. Sustained communication and confidence-building measures between the two militaries are, on that view, the cheapest insurance available.

The White House issued no immediate account of the exchange with Xi. American officials have for years avoided stating outright opposition to Taiwanese independence, and any change in the wording would raise questions about Washington's willingness to defend the island while inviting resistance in Congress.

Xi returned to a theme he has raised with Trump before, invoking the "Thucydides Trap", the idea that rivalry between an established power and a rising one tends towards war. He maintained that the trap can be avoided, argued that both countries gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation, and called for regular military dialogue and stronger mechanisms to prevent crises. Trump reached for history, pointing to the two countries' wartime alliance against Japan as evidence of what shared interests can achieve.

On artificial intelligence the two men diverged in public, even as the field offered them an obvious reason to cooperate. Trump has said the field should be renamed super intelligence, and he wrote on social media that he wants to leave it "exactly where it is", relying on the Department of Justice rather than new guardrails; he insisted China shared that view. Xi took a different line, saying that as the leading nations in AI, China and the United States must manage its growth. "We have both the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good, and ensure that the development of AI is always under human control and serves the well-being of the people," Xi said. The guest list for the state dinner reflected the stakes, with executives from Alphabet, OpenAI and Nvidia expected to attend.

Beneath the public disagreement, think tanks had urged the two governments to build at least a minimal common floor. The Center for Strategic and International Studies argued before the summit that Washington and Beijing had an opportunity to establish common approaches to AI safety, including incident-reporting channels, shared definitions and baseline safety practices. The difficulty is that AI is also the field in which the two powers are now competing to write the rules: Beijing has moved to establish what it calls the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation, while Washington is advancing its own international initiatives. The parallel efforts amount to an emerging contest over technological standards, institutional influence and the future governance of AI.

That contest, in turn, points to a broader lesson. Personal diplomacy between Trump and Xi can open channels, but it cannot by itself stabilise a relationship of this magnitude. What the two governments lack, and what several analysts argued the summit should now supply, is an institutional framework for managing the competition: regular high-level meetings, military-to-military communication, diplomatic hotlines and structured discussions on technology that draw boundaries around strategic rivalry. The same logic applies to critical minerals and trade, where agreements that reduce immediate tension can enable further negotiation, but only a durable framework can provide predictable rules and mechanisms for future disputes.

The ceremonial programme was itself a study in projection. Troops in wigs and three-cornered hats paraded in a Rose Garden remodelled to resemble one of Trump's golf clubs, and fighter jets and bombers passed overhead during ceremonies held across two days, one pass loud enough to make the president flinch. When reporters were summoned, it was not to hear the leaders discuss affairs of state but to watch them inspect the Marine One helicopter and a redesign of the South Lawn that features a large helipad stamped with the presidential seal. Asked about the policy talks, Trump was dismissive. "He loves good granite," he said of Xi. "Great meeting."

Critics at home and abroad read the visit very differently. Commentators argued that Trump had been reduced to courting Beijing, noting that the tarmac greeting was an honour no foreign leader had received from an American president in more than six decades. Others judged that the elaborate ceremonies concealed an absence of serious results, with mutual tariff reductions and new communication channels the only outcomes and geopolitical questions left to one side.

In Taiwan, Lee Yen-hsiu, a legislator from the Kuomintang, said the meeting had rendered ineffective an "anti-China card" that Washington and Taipei could once play together, a complaint that captured the anxiety of a partner watching its leverage thin.

The states that had been pitched as alternatives to China also have reason to be uneasy. Vietnam, India and Mexico built factories, ports and industrial parks on the expectation that global manufacturers would relocate, and a durable understanding between Washington and Beijing would leave some of that capacity underused. The retreat from decoupling is equally awkward for American firms that invested on the promise of tariffs and subsidies, and for workers hired to staff the reshoring that now looks less certain.

The clearest source of Chinese leverage, control over the processing and supply of critical minerals, was left untouched by the summit. Manufacturers dependent on those materials had waited for a resolution of the supply restrictions affecting their businesses, and none was announced. Until there is one, the truce will rest on an imbalance that Beijing can turn to its advantage whenever it chooses.

What follows will be decided in the negotiating round that the two-month extension has postponed. Tariffs, agricultural purchases, rare earths and technology controls all remain unresolved, and each is capable of reopening the dispute. For now both governments have chosen stability over confrontation, avoiding the rupture that a collapse in talks would bring. Rivalry between the two powers may be unavoidable, but open conflict is not; the question left hanging over the summit is whether the two sides can convert the pause into the steady, pragmatic diplomacy that would make that claim true.