Donald Trump will personally greet 
Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Wednesday, when the Chinese president arrives to open a state visit that includes White House meetings and a state dinner. Xi is due to land at 4 p.m. on Sept. 23, or 2000 GMT, an unnamed US official told AFP, Taiwan's Central News Agency reported. The greeting is a rare courtesy: when Trump landed in Beijing in May, he was met by Chinese Vice President Han Zheng.
How is Washington preparing? The visit, for which Taiwan's Central News Agency reported Washington is arranging a high-profile welcome ceremony, follows the red carpet Beijing rolled out for Trump in May. A military honor guard has been rehearsing on the White House driveway, and a new granite helicopter pad on the South Lawn is ready, the Korea Times reported. Trump told reporters he would be "discussing almost everything" with Xi, but experts expect the leaders to extend a relative truce rather than produce concrete results. "I don't expect much to come out of this," Jonathan Czin of the Brookings Institution told AFP.
What did the diplomats discuss? Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a phone call on Thursday that the two countries "should prepare well for the next stage of high-level interactions in the spirit of equality, respect and reciprocity," China's foreign ministry said, Channel News Asia reported. The official Chinese summary of the call fell short of explicitly confirming an upcoming meeting between Xi and Trump.
What might the summit produce? Further summits are one possible outcome: the leaders are expected to meet at the APEC forum in Shenzhen in November, and Trump is expected to invite Xi to the G20 summit in Miami in December. Cooperation on AI regulation is expected to be a key topic, though Peking University professor Wang Dong said major deals are "politically out of reach for now."
Who might travel with the Chinese leader? Representatives of Xiaomi, battery maker CATL and Bank of China may join a business delegation comparable in scale to the one Trump brought to China in May, Taiwan's Central News Agency reported, citing the South China Morning Post. People familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Beijing is also weighing including BYD founder Wang Chuanfu, a step that could be seen in Washington as provocative. BYD was listed by the Pentagon as a "Chinese military company" in June.
Figures referenced: Donald Trump, Xi Jinping. — JudgeMarket.
