Trump and Xi summit may just be a ‘horse and pony show’, experts say

As United States President Donald Trump rolled out the red carpet for Chinese President Xi Jinping with a rare personal welcome at the airport, to be followed by a state banquet and a military flyover, experts warn to temper expectations as the summit is more focused on “re-establishing trust” rather than having any meaningful deals announced at the end of it.

The US and China have been locked in a trade war since Trump’s first term as president when he introduced levies on imports of certain industrial goods, and Beijing retaliated with tariffs on a range of US exports including soya beans, pork and electric vehicles. Some of those policies continued under Trump’s successor, President Joe Biden, who also introduced other measures, including curbs on chip exports.

But relations really nosedived with Trump’s second term when he unleashed new tariffs on China, including threatening levies of 200 percent at one point last year, with Beijing promising to hit back at similar levels and throttling exports of critical minerals that are used in manufacturing a range of products from laptops and cellphones to cars and renewable energy infrastructure.

While both sides have since stepped back from that cliff after the two leaders met in late October in Busan on the sidelines of the APEC summit in South Korea, US tariffs are still at a hefty average of 36.5 percent, while China’s tariffs on US goods average out to 31 percent.

“This is not a bargaining summit,” Reza Hasmath, academic faculty adviser at The China Institute at the University of Alberta, told Al Jazeera. “It’s a stabilising summit.”

Apart from tariffs, other items on the agenda include cooperation on artificial intelligence safety, Iran and Taiwan.

“The point of the summit is to set up a continuation of the truce” that was arrived at in Busan, said Mary E Lovely, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics.

It was after that meeting that China resumed its supply of critical minerals. The US wants those deliveries to be sped up and “for that reason alone, the US will want a continuation of the truce”, Lovely added.