By Liz Hoffman
Publication Date: 2026-05-07 16:16:00
There’s talk of a Chinese order for 500 Boeing MAX planes, as well as sales of American soybeans, but there’s likely to be less commercial fanfare than on Trump’s previous foreign trips, including to the Gulf last year. Likely off the table is the idea of allowing Chinese electric carmakers to set up manufacturing plants in the US.
“I don’t want to think about some big headline with the Chinese where I have really hot rhetoric, I say really tough things, but at the end of the day, do nothing,” Greer told Semafor in an interview last month. “I’d much rather do what we’re doing now, which is we’re going to talk to the Chinese, because we live in this world together.”
Washington has been floating the idea of setting up a Board of Trade to manage two-way flows of non-sensitive products within a tariff structure and a separate Board of Investment. (“These are government-to-government” arrangements, Greer said in the interview. “We’re not going to have CEOs be on these boards, so don’t ask.“)
These deliverables reflect the reality that for both Washington and Beijing, the main goal of the summit is to extend a trade truce that Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Trump agreed upon at their October meeting in South Korea. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the two sides are discussing the possibility of launching a dialogue on AI safety, although a previous US effort during the Biden administration to engage in talks with Beijing on the subject…