Xi unlikely to bring CEO delegation to Trump summit, damping deal expectations

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is unlikely to bring a delegation of corporate executives when he comes to Washington on Thursday to meet President Trump, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, damping expectations for major business deals from the summit.

The report, citing people familiar with the matter, said preparations for Xi's visit were ongoing and the plans could change — but the direction of travel is unmistakable: no corporate delegation, no deal-signing photo ops. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said it had no information to provide; the White House, Treasury Department, Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative's office did not respond to the Journal's requests for comment.

The report is a sharp reversal of the narrative that had been building around the summit. On Sept. 4, Reuters reported exclusively that Xi was preparing a large business delegation to accompany him to Washington — an unusual move, two sources said, given U.S. skepticism toward Chinese investment and Beijing's strained ties with private enterprise. That prospect helped fuel expectations that Thursday's meeting might produce tangible commercial deliverables. The Journal's account effectively deflates that.

Why a CEO roster matters is straightforward: at leader-level summits, a corporate delegation is a signal of deal-readiness — the counterparties are in the room precisely because something is expected to be signed. In 2015, the last time Xi traveled to the U.S. with a sizeable business contingent, China signed a $38 billion agreement for 300 Boeing aircraft, and Chinese tech executives sat down with Apple's Tim Cook, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos, per Reuters. The Journal's read of the current trip is the opposite: with the delegation unlikely, so are headline deals.

The downshift in expectations is echoed in investor sentiment. Reuters Breakingviews ran a Sept. 21 analysis headlined "Top priority for Trump-Xi summit is no big deals," and noted that roughly 70% of investors surveyed by Goldman Sachs earlier this month said they expected Xi's state visit to be a "symbolic" or "non-event" — with none of the hundred-odd investors polled predicting a negative outcome. The Journal separately reported that political tensions have limited the ability of big Chinese companies to invest in U.S. production, normally a major topic when foreign CEOs visit Washington.

Instead of breakthroughs, the likeliest economic outcome is maintenance. The bilateral tariff truce, extended in May, expires Nov. 10. The plausible deliverables, per the Breakingviews analysis, are a truce extension of another six to twelve months, lower tariffs on select nonsensitive goods, and incremental progress on the Board of Trade — the May framework's mechanism for cutting tariffs on non-strategic goods. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday on Fox News that the Board of Trade now has working procedures and terms of reference: "We now have working procedures set up, we have terms of reference, we're actually going through and we're picking a relatively small subset of goods where America and China agree we should be trading."

On the trade-balance leg, direct U.S. imports from China fell to a 16-year low of $309 billion in 2025, per Breakingviews, and Washington last month accused more than 40 countries of helping Beijing illegally avoid tariffs on some $75 billion in goods annually via transshipment. Agricultural purchases are another watched metric: non-soybean purchases already look set to fall $10 billion short of this year's nominal $17 billion target, the analysis said.

The agenda will not be purely commercial. A senior U.S. official told the Journal that Trump and Xi are expected to discuss AI and rare earths — the two countries' respective chokeholds on semiconductors and rare-earth exports that have underpinned what Breakingviews calls a "fragile economic armistice." Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that Washington and Beijing were discussing ways to warn each other about AI incidents that pose national security risks, and he proposed another U.S.-China AI dialogue at last-minute preparatory talks in New York with Vice Premier He Lifeng.

What the summit will lack in substance, the White House intends to supply in ceremony. In a rare move, Trump is set to personally welcome Xi at Joint Base Andrews when the Chinese leader lands — when Trump visited Beijing in May, Xi sent a subordinate to greet him at the airport. Thursday brings a state arrival ceremony featuring 479 military personnel, according to a statement from the first lady's office, followed by the summit meeting and a state dinner. Trump said last week the dinner would be held in "a very little room," lamenting that the White House ballroom he wants built isn't ready: "I literally could tell you that thousands of people would love to be at that dinner."

The dinner guest list is itself a study in asymmetry. Media reports have top U.S. CEOs — OpenAI's Sam Altman, JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon, Citigroup's Jane Fraser and Nvidia's Jensen Huang — seated at the table. If the Journal's reporting holds, their Chinese counterparts will be absent. When Trump visited Beijing in May, he brought U.S. executives including Tesla's Elon Musk and Nvidia's Huang; the Chinese side did not field a comparable corporate delegation then, either.

The political logic of restraint is legible on both sides. Per the Breakingviews analysis, the political risks attached to any deal perceived as easing up on China — coming just before midterm elections where Democrats are forecast to make big gains — argue against the Trump administration banking substantial, lasting breakthroughs. For Beijing, a no-big-deals summit preserves the bilateral limbo while regular leader-level meetings continue.

Geopolitics beyond trade may still intrude. Breakingviews lists Taiwan's status and the U.S. war with Iran as likely agenda items; Xi reiterated China's position on Taiwan's sovereignty at the last summit, and the U.S. has since held off on arms sales to Taipei. Trump and Xi are expected to get together twice more this year.

Thursday's visit is Xi's first state visit to Washington in 11 years and the leaders' second meeting this year. The next dated marker after Thursday is the Nov. 10 truce expiry — and the market now has a cleaner read on what Thursday is for: ceremony, maintenance, and a reset of expectations, not deals.