Trump Will Greet Xi at the Airport — a Courtesy Beijing Answered in May With Its No. 8 Official

Xi Jinping lands at Joint Base Andrews around 4 PM on September 23, and Trump will be on the tarmac to meet him — the first airport greeting he has given any foreign leader in his second term. Politico called it what it is: "a courtship effort."

The reciprocal history makes the gesture legible. When Trump flew to Beijing for the May summit, Xi did not come to the airport. China sent Vice President Han Zheng — eighth in the party hierarchy — a slight read at the time as deliberate. Xi then opened the meeting itself with a warning that mishandling Taiwan "could bring the two countries into conflict."

Four months later, the American president waits on the tarmac. A former senior US official supplied the translation: Xi "wants to be seen as Trump's equal," and the greeting delivers the G2 optics Beijing has sought for two decades.

Why the Courtship: Count the Asks

Protocol maps leverage, and the asks list explains the protocol. Trump, six weeks from the midterms, needs deliverables:

• Agricultural purchases and non-tariff barrier relief — USTR's Greer has pre-announced that "several things" on agriculture will be unveiled; farm-state votes are the currency
• An extension of the Busan tariff truce struck last October
• Investment headlines — the state dinner seats Jensen Huang and Sam Altman, with BYD chairman Wang Chuanfu floated on the Chinese side, days after Trump opened the door to Chinese car plants in America
• And the largest one: Iran. China buys the overwhelming share of Iranian crude — the structural ceiling on the economic isolation campaign since it began. Trump has promised the war ends "right after the election." If that promise has a mechanism, it runs through Beijing pressuring Tehran.

What does Xi need? By Reuters' sourcing, one word: for Washington to say it "opposes" Taiwan independence rather than "does not support" it. Diplomatic vocabulary that costs Trump nothing at a podium and reorders the Taiwan Strait's deterrence arithmetic permanently.

The pressure tools are already being holstered. Bloomberg reports the administration postponed its planned Section 301 overcapacity report — which would have added 7.5% tariffs on Chinese goods — until after the summit. A tariff regime that has spent the year escalating against Canada, the EU, and Mexico is pausing, specifically for China, specifically now. Add the airport greeting, the state dinner, and the auto-plant opening, and the shape of the meeting is set before it begins: America is arriving as the party that needs things, because it is the party with a deadline. Xi has two more meetings with Trump already scheduled — November and December. He can bank the optics now and concede nothing; the analysis circulating in Washington says exactly that: grand summit, no conclusions.

The Taiwan Overhang

The concession being watched for is specific. US arms sales to Taiwan have been paused since the May summit. Whether they resume — and whether the "oppose independence" formulation surfaces in any joint language — is the summit's real output, whatever the agricultural announcements say.

The pattern from May is instructive: Xi stated Taiwan was the "core of core interests," and the two sides agreed to "constructive and strategic stability" — language Washington analysts read as the US accommodating China's red line. Every element of this summit's staging suggests the accommodation has continued.

Japan is behaving as if it believes that. Prime Minister Takaichi is seeking a bilateral with Trump at the UN General Assembly on September 22 — the day before Xi lands — to coordinate China policy in advance. Allies who trust the process do not schedule interception meetings.