There have been 33 official meetings and summits between US and Chinese presidents since President Richard Nixon’s historic trip in February 1972, not counting visits outside China and the United States. Some presidents have been frequent travelers, Hu Jintao and George W. Bush setting individual records. But at no other time have the presidents of the two nations agreed to meet four times in a single year, making this a record year for US-China summitry.
AmCham HK has been tracking the significance of these encounters closely, first through its annual China Conference in April, more recently through an expert panel discussion in May following President Trump’s visit to Beijing from May 14-15, his second including one in 2017 during his first term in office.
The timing of AmCham’s annual China conference on April 28 was set to fall after US President Donald Trump’s planned visit to Beijing from March 31 to April 2, which would have made it an opportunity to take a retrospective look at the summit. Instead, because of the war with Iran, the White House postponed the summit to mid-May. So the conference actually served as a preview of the summit.
Following the presidential summit in Beijing between President Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping, AmCham organized a special debrief on May 18, to look back and look ahead at the significance of the summit.
Both conferences and the post-summit debrief focused on the striking shift in tone between the tariff and rare earth collisions in 2025, the first year of Trump’s second term, and the conciliatory note struck first at the meeting between Trump and Xi in Busan, South Korea, last October, on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting.
In Busan, the two nations agreed to a one-year suspension of retaliatory tariffs as well as China’s export controls on rare earths, and US Section 301 investigations, as well as renewed Chinese agricultural purchases.
After nine years of deep chill in the US-China relationship, a conciliatory summit
Among the significant outcomes of the May 2026 summit meeting in Beijing was agreement by both the White House and Beijing to adopt a policy of “constructive strategic stability,” a phrase coined by Beijing. Both the US and China had agreed to a policy of “strategic stability” in Busan, so the new addition was “constructive,” added by President Xi in his welcome speech in Beijing.
Analysts said that the most surprising and significant outcome of the meeting was that President Xi confirmed a date for the next meeting between the two leaders proposed by President Trump on September 24 in Washington. Normally, Beijing is more cautious and waits until closer to the event to specify a date, after outcomes are more certain.
President Xi “is taking a huge bet on his relationship with President Trump to maintain this trajectory of strategic stability or constructive stability, to get some more positive outcomes and build up positive momentum in the relationship,” said Ambassador Kurt Tong at the AmCham debrief in May. Ambassador Tong is a former US Consul General in Hong Kong and Macau and managing partner of The Asia Group.
He continued: “It’s not that there is going to be a huge breakthrough, that suddenly the US and China are going to love each other on every single topic, but the alternative is not tending to the relationship, not taking advantage of President Trump’s business sensibilities, and then allowing the two governments to go back into a cycle of action, reaction and escalation, which ends up being quite costly for both governments and societies.”
Ambassador Tong cautioned: “The first of perhaps more meetings in 2026 between the leaders is designed to build upon that base of stability and see if the two governments can do things together that are useful. It won’t be in some grand G2 structure, or in a sense that everything’s OK in the relationship. If the relationship is now a friendly one, it is still tinged with a high degree of suspicion on both sides.”
Another surprise was the prominence of the business delegation, according to Ambassador Tong. The White House pulled together 17 CEOs including Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Tim Cook of Apple, Larry Fik of BlackRock, as well as executives from Meta, Visa, J.P. Morgan, Boeing, Cargill and more. Nvidia’s Huang boarded Air Force One at the last minute in Alaska.
According to the White House, Boeing came away with a renewed commitment to buy an “initial” 200 jets, with an estimated value of between USD 17 billion and USD 19 billion. China and the US will establish a Board of Trade and a Board of Investment “as the cornerstone of this historic agreement,” according to a White House Fact Sheet on May 17.
China will also restore market access for US beef while purchasing at least USD 17 billion annually in 2026, on a pro-rated basis, 2027 and 2028. These were confirmed by China’s Ministry of Commerce on May 20, along with a statement that it hoped Washington would “honor its commitments” on keeping US tariffs at the level agreed at the Busan summit.
In all, there will potentially be three more presidential meetings in 2026, the APEC Economic Leader’s meeting in Shenzhen, China on November 18-19 and the G20 Leader’s Summit in Miami at the Trump National Doral golf resort from December 14-15.
The debrief was held under the Chatham House rule and Ambassador Tong’s remarks are published with his permission. In addition to Ambassador Tong, the panel included Ben Kostrzewa, a partner at Hogan Lovells, Jianwei Xu, a senior economist at Natixis and Eden Woon, president of AmCham HK.
AmCham’s 2026 China Conference – “Strategy in an Age of Uncertainty”
AmCham’s flagship annual conference on China was in many ways a preview of the change in mood towards cautious optimism in business and an acknowledged peer-to-peer relationship between the world’s largest economies. David Butts, chairman of AmCham, described 2026 as likely to become a “pivotal year in the world’s most consequential bilateral relationship.” The keynote speaker, veteran Singaporean diplomat Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani reflected on the disruption caused by the war with Iran that started on February 28. An edited version of his speech is the cover story of the May-June issue of AmCham HK e-Magazine.
Introductory remarks at the China conference were by Cui Jianchun, Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong, and US Consul General Julie Eadeh. Both reviewed the role of AmCham in Hong Kong’s business community, with Commissioner Cui acknowledging the contribution of Hong Kong’s largest international chamber to the One Country Two Systems model of Hong Kong’s governance.
Ambassador Eadeh noted the improvement of US relations with Hong Kong, with the visit to the territory in March by Trump ally Steve Daines, Republican senator from Montana, the first visit by a sitting US senator since 2019. In the year of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US as a nation, she described Hong Kong as “historically a place for constructive dialogue” with China, on the basis of “fairness, equality and reciprocity.”
Two panel sessions at the China conference focused on technological competition and the Chinese economy, with a closing keynote speech by Zongyuan Zoe Liu, the Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances its Global Ambitions (Harvard University Press, 2023).
Denis Simon, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute, moderated the session on technology, which looked at the shift in technological achievement from West to East, and questions of the role technology plays in US-China geopolitical competition. He was joined by George Chen, partner of The Asia Group, Dan Li, founder and CEO of Rabyte Technology, Rui Ma, founder of Tech Buzz China, Shaun Rein, founder of China Market Research Group, and Paul Triolo, partner of Albright Stonebridge Group.
Joe Ngai, senior partner and chairman, Greater China, of McKinsey, moderated the second panel on the Chinese domestic market. The problem for business is that the double-digit growth rates of the 2000s and 2010s aren’t coming back. Foreign investors and their domestic peers alike need to adjust to an era of moderate growth and deflationary pressures.
Introductory remarks at the China conference were by Cui Jianchun, Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong, and US Consul General Julie Eadeh. Both reviewed the role of AmCham in Hong Kong’s business community, with Commissioner Cui acknowledging the contribution of Hong Kong’s largest international chamber to the One Country Two Systems model of Hong Kong’s governance.
A key question for the panel was whether the Chinese economy can shift from export and investment-led growth to consumer-led growth. Consumer-led growth has been an economic target for years, but with the slowdown in Gross Domestic Product growth at the macro-economic level, analysts regularly accuse Beijing of not doing enough to boost consumption and continuing to encourage over-capacity and exports.
Tao Wang, senior advisor to UBS Global Research challenged this view. She said, “When we say Chinese consumption is weak, it does not mean that it is small or not growing.” It is still the largest consumer market in the world, and growth is only weak compared to the past. Eric Zheng, president of AmCham Shanghai, and former chairman of AIG Insurance Company China, said that after geopolitics, the second greatest concern of his members was with domestic competition, with China’s economic slowdown taking third place.
“Localization is key,” Zheng said. “If you want to succeed, you need to give your local team more leeway.” Sam Su, former chairman of Yum China, which operates KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell in China, and controlled the McDonald’s franchise until 2017, agreed. “This is the most competitive market in the world,” he said. “The biggest frustration of people on the ground is that they lack authority.
Arthur Kroeber, a founding partner of Gavekal Dragonomics, added that local managers have trouble getting approval for the scale of investment they need from headquarters, who balk without the growth rates of five years ago. “The market risks are manageable, but they don’t see it,” he added.
What next?
Where the China market goes next is difficult to predict, with domestic Chinese companies seeking relief from the high level of competition at home by investing in offshore manufacturing, and some multinationals preferring to remain in China rather than pursue “China plus one” strategies.
China, indeed, seems safer from a tariff perspective, with the extension of the tariff ‘truce,’ than third countries in Southeast Asia or elsewhere that are likely targets of Section 301 investigations. Such investigations, under the Trade Act of 1974, could return tariffs to the high levels before the US Supreme Court struck down tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in February.
Most countries remain under a 10 percent global tariff imposed under Section 122, invoked to address balance of payments issues. These were imposed by the US administration on an emergency basis for 150 days, which runs out on July 24 unless extended by Congress.
AmCham HK will continue to seek opportunities to support business with insights from key players and experts, unpacking developments as they arise in a year of summitry, potential U-turns and, hopefully, at least a measure of “constructive strategic stability.”