Chinese President Xi Jinping's first state visit to Washington in 11 years delivered pandas, pageantry and a youth exchange offer, but no breakthrough on trade, artificial intelligence or Taiwan.

Xi and US President Donald Trump met at the White House on September 24, a day after Washington announced a two-month extension of their trade truce to January 10. The two economic teams had "reached a new joint arrangement", Xi said, according to the Chinese foreign ministry's readout of the talks, which did not say what the arrangement contained. Trump called it a "great meeting" but declined to answer reporters' questions on substance. The White House had yet to publish its own account of the talks.

It was the third face-to-face meeting between the two men in less than a year, after their summit in Busan in October 2025 and Trump's trip to Beijing in May, and it confirmed a pattern of summits that keep the relationship stable without settling its core disputes.

Beijing used the readout to spell out what it means by the "constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability" the two leaders signed up to in May: "Cooperation is the mainstay, competition is kept within proper limits, differences are managed and peace can be expected."

China-watcher Zhai Xiang boiled the Chinese readout down to three lines on X: "Trade: cooperate. AI: compete, but cooperate. Taiwan: red lines."

The speech was part of an ongoing campaign to redefine the rules of the so-called rules-based order that previously guided the US and its partners in what China complained as a “unipolar” world. But things have changed as the BRICS nations rapidly close the gap as the world moves into the Interregnum of a post Pax Americana world and a new set of rules is needed, said Xi together with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an 8,000 word essay the paid penned last year – rules for the new multipolar world, they argued.

"Competition without conflict" is the guiding principle. Xi handed a softer deliverable as part of his speech in the US, inviting 100,000 young Americans to visit China over the next five years, and said there was room for more direct flights as well as announcing that two pandas would arrive at Zoo Atlanta within days.

But the geopolitical  and business substance was thinner. Fewer than 20 of the more than 130 guests at the state dinner came from the Chinese side, and Xi left behind the delegation of Chinese executives that had been expected, dimming the prospect of the big business deals Trump favours.

Two lists

On trade, Xi told Trump that "to keep the economic and trade ties stable, the list of cooperation needs to be lengthened, and the list of issues shortened", according to the readout. In the Chinese account, Trump said the latest consultations had "produced new outcomes" and that both sides should "continue the dialogue and reach an even better deal". Trump said in his own remarks that the two had made "tremendous strides", pointing to efforts to open the Chinese market to US farmers and ranchers through the newly created Board of Trade.

Markets were unconvinced. Hong Kong's benchmark stock index slipped 1.7% on September 25 on the lack of concrete progress, while markets in mainland China, Taiwan and South Korea were closed for holidays. "Although the extension provides some near-term visibility for markets, it falls well short of the six-month extension we had hoped for and is unlikely to materially influence corporate investment decisions," Carlos Casanova, senior economist for Asia at Union Bancaire Privee, said in a note. He pointed to the next scheduled meeting of the two leaders at the APEC summit in Shenzhen on November 18-19 as a chance for more agreements to be announced "on Chinese soil".

Racing, with guardrails

AI is the new frontline in the rivalry and the one area where the summit moved the conversation on. Trump had posted before the meeting that he wanted to keep AI "exactly where it is", standing by his opposition to guardrails, and has dismissed warnings about the technology's risks as a "hoax". Xi sounded more open to limits. "We have both the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good and ensure the development of AI is always under human control," he said at the White House.

In the talks Xi went further, according to the Chinese readout: "Both China and the United States have strong AI capabilities. They may have competition, but they may cooperate even more. The right thing to do is to draw on each other's strengths, not guard against each other." Xi also called for "a race of catching up with one another, not a wrestle in which one either wins or loses", Al Jazeera reported. It was the first time the two leaders had jointly addressed warnings from Silicon Valley that the technology could threaten humanity, and Xi carried the message to a state dinner where Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Tesla's Elon Musk and Apple's Tim Cook sat at the top table, as the talk over dinner turned to AI oversight.

Neither side intends to slow down. Days before the summit Alibaba said it was building a model of up to 10 trillion parameters and rolling out its own AI chips, and Huawei brought forward high-powered chips meant to replace Nvidia's processors, Bloomberg reported. What is on the table is narrow guardrails rather than speed limits: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Washington had proposed an emergency hotline for AI incidents and a dialogue mechanism at talks with Vice Premier He Lifeng in New York on September 20.

"Neither side wants to give up the development or slow down the development," Elly Rostoum, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said before the summit. "But they understand that this is serious enough that they have to talk." Kyle Chan of the Brookings Institution saw "growing convergence" on risks such as cybersecurity, biological weapons and non-state actors, though existential risk from AI is "really not a major topic" for Chinese policymakers.

The chip war was left untouched. The absence of a technology trade deal will push Chinese AI developers such as Tencent, DeepSeek and Alibaba to keep favouring domestic suppliers over Nvidia, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Robert Lea and Jasmine Lyu wrote in a note.

Red line on Taiwan

Xi was blunt on Taiwan. "The Chinese side's position on safeguarding national reunification and territorial integrity is clear-cut," the readout said. "It is hoped that the US side will adhere to the correct position of opposing 'Taiwan independence', and handle the Taiwan question with caution." It was his most explicit call yet for Washington to shift its stance, Bloomberg reported. Official US policy is that it does not support Taiwanese independence and opposes unilateral changes to the status quo by either side, a formula that stops short of the "oppose" Beijing wants. Trump did not mention Taiwan in his formal remarks, and the Taiwan demand dominated China's own framing of the day.

Beijing has already had some success on the issue. The US approved an $11.1bn arms package for Taiwan in December, but after the Beijing summit in May Trump suspended a $14bn weapons deal for the island. "Taiwan remains the ultimate low-probability, catastrophic-impact tail risk - where a single round of arms sales can snap a multibillion-dollar trade truce in an instant," Einar Tangen, a senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation, told Al Jazeera.

The talks also covered the Middle East, the war in Ukraine and the Korean Peninsula, and Xi backed a return by Washington and Tehran to an interim agreement that collapsed shortly after it was announced in June. Trump's handling of the visit drew fire from his own party. "I would have suggested the president not invite Xi Jinping to Washington for such a lavish welcome," said Republican Senator Roger Wicker.

Hostile, but hooked

The truce is the only hard outcome, and analysts doubt it will hold for long. "The two-month extension isn't a bridge to a grand bargain - it's a temporary sandbag holding back a structural flood," Tangen said, calling it "transactional theatre" before the US midterm elections in November. "The extensions are getting shorter and shorter, which means they haven't found a common ground on many issues," said Phillippe Le Corre, a professor at France's ESSEC Business School.

Tariffs remain high on both sides. Chinese goods entering the US still face average duties of 36.5% and US goods entering China 31%, according to a Congressional Research Service report from July cited by Al Jazeera. China's leverage lies in rare earths: it holds around 60% of known deposits and processes some 90%, and the export curbs it drew up last year are on hold rather than scrapped. Washington's threat of secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian oil, set out in the hellish sanctions law, falls hardest on China. "Washington is hostile, but it is hooked," Tangen said. "You cannot threaten China with secondary sanctions on energy while desperately needing its rare-earths to fuel your military-industrial base."

Chinese analysts were more hopeful. Sun Chenghao, a fellow at Tsinghua University's Center for International Security and Strategy, called the extension a "useful interim step". "From China's perspective, a sustainable agreement needs reciprocal benefits and greater policy predictability," he said. "Additional purchases cannot indefinitely compensate for uncertainty over tariffs, technology restrictions and market access."

The truce expires just after the leaders are due to meet again at APEC in Shenzhen and at the G20 in Miami in December, where Washington has also invited Russian President Vladimir Putin. "While China is a long-term planner, durable is a word that can hardly be associated with Trump," Le Corre said.