Will Trump and Xi extend their trade truce?
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Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Wednesday, September twenty-third, and this is your FT news briefing. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are talking trade this week, and UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham also got some FaceTime with the US president. Plus, we look at conflicts of interest in a bid for a Russian oil company. I'm Sonia Hudson Informark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day.
US President Donald Trump is meeting China's Xi Jinping this week. The highly anticipated summit is expected to cover topics from AI safety to trade and the Iran war. Dmitry Sevastopulo is the FT's US China correspondent. He joins me now to discuss. Hi, Dimitri.
Hi, Sonia.
So, what's the backdrop heading into this summit? What do people need to know?
Well, Donald Trump went to Beijing for a state visit in May, and now Xi Jinping is coming to Washington for a reciprocal visit. Uh, in the background, the big thing that's happening is that the US and China uh have a trade war that was launched last year by Donald Trump. They agreed a ceasefire in the trade war in October last year. There are still many issues on the table with relation to that that will be discussed on Thursday. But I think that's the kind of broad stroke so what people need to pay attention to.
Well, what does the US wanna get out of this summit?
Well, the two countries are, you know, mired in what some people call strategic stability and other people call strategic stalemate. I think both sides are trying to maintain that stability. Um, on the other hand, they also need to address some big issues like whether they can extend the ceasefire in the trade ward. That ceasefire expires on November 10th. The US wants to extend the ceasefire by only six months because they think. It gives them continued leverage over China. The Chinese want to extend for the remainder of Donald Trump's term. That's one of the key issues in the summit. Another is Treasury Secretary Scott Besson told me on Sunday that the US and China had agreed to set up an AI dialogue, a mechanism for the two sides to discuss guardrails, safety issues, which is becoming increasingly important.
So I think that's going to be one of the big announcements that we see on Thursday.
Dimitri, would you consider Trump or officials in his administration China hawks?
I think you have to separate Trump from his officials. So Trump is a hawk when it comes to trade, but he is not really as hawk when it comes to security issues, defense, human rights. Um, but his team is very, very hawkish. And, you know, one of the things we're focused on this week is looking at why it is that the many China hawks who populate Trump's administration have been unable to do some of the things that they wanted to do over the past twenty. months. And one of the reasons is he showers the Chinese president with a lot of respect. And he doesn't want his team to do things, particularly in the security area, that might upset his relationship with uh Xi Jinping or else jeopardize the trade war truce that the two sides signed.
How do you think that dynamic could impact the summit this week?
Um, a lot of the topics they're focusing on are trade and not security issues.
What is the agenda of the Trump‑Xi trade summit and why does it matter?
Uh, you know, one of the wildcards is what Xi Jinping will ask Donald Trump to do on Taiwan. And there are a lot of people in Washington who are worried that Donald Trump might sacrifice support for Taiwan to get something else from Xi Jinping, for example, support to end the war in Iran. And so people will be paying an awful lot of attention to that.
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