For two months, Chinese diplomats have courted the White House, hoping to lock in a visit by President Trump to China that would grant leader Xi Jinping a significant diplomatic victory, according to people familiar with the matter.
In return, the U.S. administration has straightforward demands, the people said: tangible concessions, or “deliverables,” from Beijing on everything from trade to TikTok.
So far, China has conceded little. Now, a crucial round of trade talks in Madrid is poised to reveal whether Beijing is finally ready to give some ground, or if it intends to press on with its delicate maneuver to secure a presidential visit by offering up as little as possible.
Central to the negotiations that began Sunday between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and his Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier He Lifeng, is the fate of TikTok, the popular video-sharing app whose U.S. operations hang in the balance. TikTok has until Wednesday to secure a deal that satisfies a congressional order for its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell its controlling stake. Trump has extended similar deadlines three times this year.
The major sticking point is the app’s powerful recommendation algorithm—its secret sauce. Beijing, which must approve any sale, has placed this technology on an export-control list and has so far given no indication it will allow ByteDance to part with it, essentially killing any prospect of a deal.
For the Trump administration, TikTok is now the litmus test. Any flexibility from Beijing on the sale would be an indicator of its readiness to make the concessions required to secure a presidential visit, the people said.
China’s Commerce Ministry said Friday that “the Chinese side urges the U.S. side to meet China halfway” and to resolve issues through dialogue. The ministry didn’t elaborate on what such a deal would look like.
A Treasury spokesperson declined to comment.
The negotiations in Madrid, following three rounds of high-level trade talks between the two sides that all resulted in a tariff truce, come as both Washington and Beijing lay the groundwork for a potential leaders’ summit later this year. Xi invited Trump to visit China when the two spoke on the phone in June.
While officials in Washington are eyeing a late-October gathering of Asia-Pacific leaders in South Korea as a likely venue, Beijing is signaling that it prefers a bilateral summit in China, according to the people familiar with the matter. That’s because, the people said, Chinese officials want to better choreograph the event to make Xi look strong, and to avoid any unwanted surprises.
They are particularly worried about a repeat of what happened to Ukraine’s President Zelensky, who received a public dressing-down from Trump in the Oval Office earlier this year. Chinese officials, who want to avoid a similar embarrassment for their leader, see the open press and unpredictability of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum as a risk. A tightly managed summit on home turf is their way of ensuring there are no missteps.
Beijing is sending Premier Li Qiang to the United Nations General Assembly later this month, the people said, in hopes that he will meet with senior administration officials to make the case for a Trump visit to China. Li is expected to signal, according to the people, that if Trump travels to China this year, Xi would be open to going to the U.S. next year for the Group-of-20 leaders’ summit.
“The central question is whether Trump will visit Beijing. Beijing is signaling they really want it,” said Evan Medeiros, a former senior national-security official of the Obama administration and now a professor at Georgetown University. “Trump and Xi meeting on the margins of APEC is a back up option and one that Beijing doesn’t want. But will they put enough on the table for Trump to visit?”
For now, Beijing is adopting a well-worn playbook for handling the U.S.: engaging in protracted negotiations that yield few tangible concessions. This strategy has also been employed by other world leaders to manage Washington’s demands while advancing their own agendas. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, has dithered over the details of potential peace talks with Ukraine, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has similarly kept diplomatic channels open while pursuing his own military and regional objectives.
But by stalling, Beijing risks frustrating its U.S. counterparts to the point of scuttling the very visit it hopes to arrange.
So far, China hasn’t acted on Trump’s demand for a sharp increase in U.S. soybean imports. In addition, the two sides are at an impasse over the U.S. request for China to crack down on the flow of the chemicals used to make fentanyl. Beijing won’t take action on the drug until the White House removes the 20% tariffs it has placed on Chinese imports as punishment for China’s role in the fentanyl trade, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
Beijing and Washington have entered talks about a deal for China to order hundreds of new Boeing jets. However, the plane maker first has to work through a backlog of undelivered jets: It reported more than 100 unfilled orders for Chinese customers through July. Therefore, according to industry executives, any new orders would be delivered years from now, possibly after Trump’s term ends.
Beijing’s unwillingness to make meaningful concessions reflects Xi’s resolve to engage in long-term competition with the U.S. Strategically, Xi feels empowered to harden his position from Trump’s first term, during which two years of negotiations yielded a trade deal widely seen as favoring the U.S.
Now, the arsenal of trade tools China has built under Xi’s leadership, including export controls of critical materials used to make chips, cars and F-35 jets, gives Beijing the ability to cause the U.S. real pain.
In a pointed move right before the start of the negotiations in Madrid, China announced Saturday that it had launched two probes into the U.S. semiconductor sector. The investigations, targeting American analog chips for alleged dumping and U.S. restrictions for discrimination, are a direct retaliation for Washington recently blacklisting 23 more Chinese firms. For the negotiations in Spain, the probes signaled a contentious start.
Write to Lingling Wei at Lingling.Wei@wsj.com
