U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the U.S. and China have agreed to extend their trade truce by two months, as President Xi Jinping landed in the United States for his first state visit in eleven years.
Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan, a celebrated soprano, touched down at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington shortly before 6 p.m. on Wednesday. Donald Trump shook hands with the couple, becoming the first U.S. president in around six decades to receive a foreign counterpart at that airport, excluding visits by the pope.
Around the same time, Bessent unveiled a new Jan. 10 deadline for the trade deal struck last year to keep down tariffs between the world’s largest economies. “I don’t know whether a bigger deal can be done,” he told Fox News.
Xi said he was “confident” the trip would produce “fruitful results,” in a written statement released by the Chinese Foreign Ministry shortly after he landed.
An extension of the trade truce combined with Trump’s gesture of courtesy at the base in Maryland, home to Air Force One, sets a positive tone for Xi’s meetings. Trump will host the Chinese leader Thursday morning with a state arrival ceremony, according to an itinerary released by the White House, which called the event “a significant milestone” in ties.
“It’s remarkable that Trump is going so out of his way to accord this kind of respect for America’s chief geopolitical rival,” said Jonathan Czin, who served as China director at the National Security Council during the administration of former President Joe Biden and is now with the Brookings think tank. “It is not clear what, if anything, Trump is getting from Xi in exchange for these many gestures of respect.”
Typically, presidents meet foreign counterparts at the White House for a formal arrival ceremony. During Xi’s state visit to the capital in 2015, his plane was met by then Vice President Joe Biden. Trump is the first American president to greet a Chinese leader on the tarmac in recent memory.
That break from protocol gives Beijing a powerful visual opportunity to present China as an equal peer to the U.S. for domestic audiences.
Xi is visiting Washington having used China’s stranglehold on rare earths to extract concessions from Trump during last year’s tariff war. The U.S. president, meanwhile, is seeking to advance commitments on purchases of agricultural goods and aircraft, as well as establish a line of communication on artificial intelligence.
