What are the real reasons behind the change of date for Trump’s China visit?
What are the real reasons behind the change of date for Trump’s China visit?
After confirmation that the high-stakes Xi-Trump summit will be delayed, analysts find a complex story beneath the official surface.
The official line is straightforward: US President Donald Trump asked for a delay to his long-anticipated summit in Beijing with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and it has been pushed back by “a month or so”.
According to the White House, moving the meeting allows Trump to remain in the US and manage the escalating war with Iran, including urgent efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
But beneath the surface, a more complex story emerges - months of growing frustrations, mismatched expectations, unanswered proposals and a distracted Trump administration, all compounded by geopolitical crosswinds.
The result is a latticework of concerns that was straining the lead-up to the summit long before missiles escalated Middle East tensions, leaving Beijing increasingly wary of the meeting and bracing for even lower expectations.
Trump did not give details on Mar 17 of the diplomatic exchange behind the rescheduling or exactly when the summit might come together, other than “in five or six weeks”.
This reflected in part huge questions over the war’s duration, its objectives and the extent of the collateral damage. Closure of the strait, a critical oil chokepoint, has already disrupted global energy markets and complicated Trump’s foreign policy agenda.
“We’re working with China. They were fine with it,” Trump told reporters, opting not to answer directly when questioned whether Tehran or Havana were now greater foreign policy priorities than Beijing.
“I look forward to seeing President Xi. He looks forward to seeing me, I think. But I do look forward to seeing, we have a good relationship with China.”
Analysts said that while the official rationale was credible, it was incomplete.
The headline explanation for postponing the summit was straightforward but “only the surface layer”, according to Denis Simon of the Quincy Institute, a think tank in Washington.
“When you look closely at timing, signalling and bargaining context, this decision reflects a much more complex mix of geopolitics, leverage-building and risk management,” he said.
Some of the elements of that complex mix were suggested by the timeline, starting when the two leaders met for roughly 100 minutes last year in South Korea, their first face-to-face meeting since Trump’s return to the White House.
In a tactical truce, the US agreed at the October summit to ease certain tariffs while China resumed soybean imports, suspended some rare earth export controls and stepped up fentanyl curbs.
Both sides framed it as a year-long cooling-off period, with early momentum driven by working groups on long-standing issues including trade, investment, agriculture, security and technology.
These groups met regularly through December, according to sources familiar with the preparations. The initial goal was to tee up concrete outcomes ahead of a landmark summit planned for early 2026 in Beijing - Trump’s first visit to China since 2017.
By January, the process had begun to slow. Beijing sent draft proposals to Washington, but received mostly silence in response, leaving Chinese officials puzzled by the lack of engagement, sources said.
One source suggested that a working group on investment appeared to have quietly faded, signalling a narrowing of ambitions amid political sensitivity over doing business with China as well as disappointment for Beijing.
China has sought more investment from the United States to counter domestic stagnation, circumvent US tariffs and blunt technological isolation, while Chinese companies have increasingly faced scrutiny and suspicion in the US.
Compounding the slowdown were logistical and substantive clashes over the proposed Beijing dates. Getting the summit back on track in short order could be difficult, analysts said.
“It is probably challenging to find a three-day window for Trump to go to China, but I’m confident he will go in the first half of this year,” said Bonnie Glaser, managing director at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “The war has to end first, though.”
Two sources said China had initially preferred late April or early May to allow more preparation time and avoid overlapping domestic priorities. The US side, however, insisted on Mar 31 to Apr 2 and Beijing ultimately acquiesced, despite reservations.
One person said there had been disquiet from the Chinese side for weeks, partly because summit planning had started late and was disorganised. The source said Beijing had wanted the trip to start later in April, but Trump had pushed for the earlier window.
The Chinese side was willing to go along but their expectations for fruitful summit outcomes diminished. Ultimately, just the fact they would meet emerged as a deliverable, in hopes of stabilising ties, according to the source familiar with Beijing’s thinking.
The US was more eager to see the summit happen quickly while Beijing was more keen to see it come off well, according to another source familiar with the talks.
On Mar 18, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt signalled the new timeline could slip beyond May, citing Trump’s domestic priorities and noting that Xi, too, was a “busy man”.
For Trump, who eschews preparation in favour of personal relations and his “gut”, the summit had been as much about photo opportunities and ceremony as the intricacies of bilateral trade and security strategy that required extensive preparation, analysts said.
The US push for “managed trade” - a formalised mechanism under which both sides would commit to balanced, equal-value purchases in designated sectors - was also central to the delay, a source said.
China has a long-standing and massive trade surplus with the US - a source of enduring tension - that was discussed in recent Paris talks with a “US-China board of trade” put forward as a potential so