Bessent floats AI hotline as harder questions stay off the agenda
The state visit designation — with its honor guards, a 21-gun salute and a formal White House South Lawn welcome — comes after Washington agreed to Beijing’s request that the trip carry the highest tier of diplomatic pageantry, a quiet weeks-long fight over a label that captures the summit’s real priorities.
Trump’s goal, a senior White House official said, is to match the reception Xi gave him when Trump visited Beijing in May. Most of all, the official said, Trump wants to impress his Chinese counterpart and keep the relationship steady heading into November’s midterm elections. The U.S. side will also be hoping to reaffirm the commitment both sides made earlier this year when Xi hosted Trump in Beijing, particularly on a tariff ceasefire that has kept a trade war from reigniting, another senior White House official said. By insisting that his welcome match the one he gave Trump in Beijing — down to the length of the two-day visit and the state dinner — policy advisers to Beijing said Xi hopes to project the image of a Chinese leader received as an equal by the president of the world’s most powerful country, at a moment when his own hold on power remains firm but the pressures around him are building.
“The optics seem to be prioritized by both sides, even above the substance,” said Daniel Kritenbrink, a former top State Department official for East Asia now at the Asia Group, a consulting firm.
Both sides remaining so focused on the show is itself a departure. For decades, U.S. officials pushed hardest for concrete outcomes while Chinese leaders valued protocol, face and respect. This time, both Xi and Trump want the meeting to look good — an unusual alignment for two governments that concede almost nothing to each other.
Kritenbrink described the pageantry as an attempt by Trump “to impose a kind of discipline” on a relationship many of his own advisers would prefer to handle more combatively. U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue served as an interlocutor between the two governments, and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles played an important role in the preparations, the people involved said.
The issues each leader cares about most are also the ones where the other is least willing to give. What neither man is prepared to do is to give much ground on the disputes that define their relationship: the race to dominate advanced technology, particularly artificial intelligence, and a widening contest for geopolitical influence, officials on both sides said. Trump wants China, one of Iran’s most important economic lifelines, to lean on Tehran as the U.S. confrontation there extends into its seventh month. Xi is expected to keep trying to coax Trump into expressing clearer opposition to Taiwanese independence and pressing Washington to hold off on a long-stalled arms package for the self-ruled democratic island Beijing views as its own.
The substantive agenda has been calibrated to be modest. At a preparatory meeting on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer met their Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier He Lifeng. Bessent described the engagement as “very successful” on trade and AI.
Greer said the U.S.-China “Board of Trade,” announced after Trump’s May summit with Xi in Beijing, is now operational. Teams on both sides are working to facilitate trade on lower-stakes, nonsensitive goods: consumer and low-tech items from China, balanced against American energy, agricultural products and potentially medical devices. Both governments have singled out agriculture as a promising area for growth.
But the harder questions are not on the table. Greer said U.S. semiconductor export controls — Washington’s most powerful lever — weren’t even on the agenda. Discussions around AI, one of the sharpest sources of friction, show how hard even modest cooperation has become. The two leaders committed to some form of AI dialogue at their Beijing meeting, but little has happened since. Bessent and He discussed the need to meet again.
Building a durable channel runs into a basic obstacle: Washington and Beijing don’t mean the same thing when they talk about “AI safety.” For the U.S., the danger is national security; for Beijing, the term is inseparable from the Communist Party’s grip on information, data and speech.
The most concrete idea Bessent floated to his Chinese counterpart was a notification system — in effect, an “AI hotline” — to alert each side when an incident rises to the level of national security. “Moving from opaque to more transparency between the No. 1 and No. 2 AI powers in the world is very important,” Bessent said.
Whether any of the more incremental steps, including the trade board and a promise to keep talking about AI, amounts to more than atmospherics is the question hanging over the visit. “Talking about AI, trade and technology is useful — but talk is not a strategy nor an outcome,” said Myron Brilliant, a former top U.S. Chamber of Commerce official. “Putting the relationship on firmer ground requires clearer national-security guardrails, stronger risk management and a more stable framework for competition.”
For Xi, the stakes are as much domestic as diplomatic. He faces mounting challenges at home: a sputtering economy, a sweeping purge of the military’s top ranks and a leadership reshuffle expected at next year’s party congress. Even Xi’s health has become a subject of speculation after he unexpectedly skipped a gala dinner on a recent trip to India. A summit that shows the Chinese leader commanding respect abroad, Kritenbrink said, will play well at home.
None of that is what this summit, so carefully choreographed, is built to produce. The pageantry is a gamble rather than a guarantee, most of all for Xi, who is staking his standing at home on a smooth performance by the least predictable counterpart in the room. And there is always a chance, political analysts in Washington say, that Trump, who has built his China policy on personal rapport, wakes up one morning and decides he has been too soft.