What Five Decades of Summits Reveal About U.S.-China Relations

The biggest mistake to make about U.S. President Donald Trump’s summit with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Beijing next month is to expect a spectacular breakthrough. Calls from American and Chinese scholars for a grand superpower bargain will go unheeded. But the second biggest mistake would be to write off the planned meeting as meaningless theater. It will be more than Xi giving Trump the “big, fat, hug” that the latter expects.

Both readings miss what more than five decades of U.S.-China presidential summitry show. These meetings rarely transform the relationship. What they can do, when handled well, is make a potentially dangerous rivalry less volatile. That matters more than ever now, with Trump’s war with Iran driving a global energy shock and adding fresh instability to an already fracturing international order.

This conclusion comes from a database of bilateral summits, sideline meetings, and calls assembled by the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. The data tracks 136 direct conversations between U.S. presidents and Chinese paramount leaders, from President Richard Nixon’s sit-down with Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong in February 1972 through Trump’s call with Xi in February. This historical record is a warning against both wishful thinking and cynicism.

When Trump lands in Beijing on May 14, he will become the first U.S. president to visit China in nearly a decade. The last, in November 2017, was Trump himself. In the years since, the relationship between the world’s two most powerful states has been battered by a trade war, a pandemic, a spy balloon, and a near-crisis over Taiwan. President Joe Biden never went, making him the first U.S. president since Jimmy Carter to leave office without visiting China. Trump and Xi’s own reunion came in October in Busan, South Korea, during a sideline meeting that produced a short-term tariff truce and a commitment to meet again in Beijing.

Presidential contact has thinned along with the relationship. So far this decade, according to our data, the two countries’ leaders have averaged 2.5 bilateral exchanges per year, down from 4.6 in the 2010s and 5.6 in the 2000s. Three-quarters of those contacts since 2020 have been phone calls rather than face-to-face meetings—the latter being more suited to building relationships and managing crises—compared to a little more than half during the previous two decades. Just when the relationship has become most treacherous, its top channel has grown brittle.

The first lesson from the database is that success should be measured not by whether Trump and Xi make a dazzling announcement but by whether they leave behind thicker diplomatic machinery than they found. Summits are usually judged by deliverables: action plans, business deals, a joint statement. Those matter. But history suggests that the more important question is whether a meeting creates durable mechanisms that make future crises easier to navigate.

A cautionary tale is Trump’s April 2017 summit with Xi at the former’s Mar-a-Lago resort. The two sides announced a cabinet-level U.S.-China Comprehensive Dialogue, a four-pillar architecture covering diplomacy and security, the economy, law enforcement and cybersecurity, and social and cultural issues. It was billed as the structure that would underpin an ambitious agenda for the bilateral relationship, and the two presidents held a record nine phone calls that year. But by the end of 2018, it was effectively defunct: Three of the dialogues met only once, and all were swept away by the trade war that Trump launched in 2018.

As with previous summits, follow-through will matter more than whatever gets announced at the meeting itself. The key points to watch are progress on deliverables ahead of Xi’s likely trip to Florida for the G-20 summit in December; whether he makes a standalone visit to the United States before then; and whether Trump decides to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Shenzhen, China, in November.

The second lesson is that leader-level diplomacy matters most when the relationship is thin. In calmer periods, working-level bureaucracies do the heavy lifting. When those channels atrophy, presidents become the only officials with the authority to clarify priorities, authorize compromises, and give subordinates political cover.

That was the achievement of Biden’s November 2023 meeting with Xi in Woodside, California. The summit reset diplomatic relations after the Chinese spy balloon incident that January; reopened military-to-military communication after it was frozen by Beijing in response to then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taiwan; and launched a new phase of counternarcotics cooperation on fentanyl, which Trump continues to advance today.

U.S.-China relations are calmer today, but lower-level contacts between the two governments remain unusually thin, in part because Trump has played such a central role in China policy. As former U.S. diplomat Ryan Hass said last year, Trump is “his own desk officer on China.” That makes him the only person who can get things done.

The third lesson is that the most productive summits focus on tractable problems rather than abstract aspirations about the broader relationship. At Sunnylands in June 2013, Xi used a famous shirtsleeves meeting with Obama to promote a “new model of major-country relations,” a concept that Washington never fully embraced and that quickly lost traction as cyber tensions and maritime disputes intensified.

By contrast, the November 2014 Obama-Xi climate policy announcement was a narrower and more concrete exercise in focusing on shared priorities. It produced specific commitments from the world’s two largest carbon emitters and built momentum toward concluding the 2015 Paris Agreement.

For 2026, an agenda for concrete action would focus on trade, investment, crisis management, and the military balance. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has signaled that Trump will seek “stability” rather than a reset, and recent U.S.-China talks in Paris have focused on rare-earth supply and the outlines of a joint “Board of Trade,” with a parallel “Board of Investment” also under discussion. That could yield a modest but meaningful outcome: a more regularized process for handling disputes in those parts of the economic relationship that both sides still want to preserve.

On strategic flash points such as Taiwan, Middle East security, and export controls on advanced chips, substantive agreement is unlikely. But what is possible is clearer signaling, better-defined red lines, and more reliable channels of communication.

The fourth lesson is not to overread atmospherics. The defining case is Xi’s lavish welcome for Trump in Beijing in November 2017, including a private meal in the Forbidden City, a banquet at the Great Hall of the People, and more than $250 billion in commercial deals, all packaged as a unique “state-visit-plus.”

Yet the spectacle obscured how little strategic alignment actually existed. The Section 301 trade investigation that became the legal basis for the tariff war had already been launched months earlier, and the warmth of the visit did nothing to stop the relationship from sliding into confrontation over the next few months and years. Nice photographs do not guarantee strategic outcomes. Neither do the big-ticket sales of airplanes and soybeans set to be announced next month.

The better indicators are somewhat duller. Did the summit create a schedule for future leader contact? Did it restore or strengthen military communications? Did it deepen working-level contacts on issues such as fentanyl, arms control, and cancer research? Did it produce credible processes for managing trade and investment disputes without touching the most sensitive national-security restrictions? If the answers are yes, Beijing will have been worth the trip.

The objective in Beijing should not be to resolve the U.S.-China rivalry, but to impose more discipline on it. In a relationship defined by strategic competition, the most valuable outcome would be a predictable operating system: clearer bottom lines and more reliable mechanisms for handling friction—and a deeper understanding of both shared and divergent interests on transnational challenges such as artificial intelligence, regional conflicts, and the Taiwan Strait. That would give officials and businesses in both countries stronger direction about where to compete and where to cooperate.

Our database shows more consistent presidential interactions in the years when Washington pursued a strategy of engagement with Beijing, in the hope of promoting convergence with a U.S.-led international order. That expectation has long faded, yet the need for leader-level diplomacy has only grown.