President Donald Trump concluded a two-day visit to China on Friday, but behind the choreographed pageantry — including a stroll through the gardens of Zhongnanhai and a welcome by cheering children — substantive results were thin on the ground.
According to Le Monde, the summit produced no notable advances behind the “façade of good relations.” One conspicuous absence from the agenda: semiconductor export controls. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told Bloomberg that chip controls “were not a major topic of discussion,” dashing hopes that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s last-minute invitation to the trip would yield a breakthrough on selling advanced H200 chips to China.
The visit did yield one concrete outcome: Xi Jinping accepted Trump’s invitation to visit the United States in the second half of the year, according to Carta Capital. Meanwhile, on social media inside China, Xi’s critics found ample material for jokes they couldn’t openly tell, as the New York Times reported — a reflection of the tightly controlled information environment surrounding the summit.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi weighed in from the sidelines, noting that Trump had said Xi offered China’s help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — a statement that underscores how the Middle East’s most strategic chokepoint has become entangled in US-China relations.
