Trump arrives in Beijing for high-stakes summit, days after Maria Cantwell returns from her own trip to China

May 13-WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump landed in China with a coterie of American business executives on Wednesday, ahead of two days of meetings with President Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders that are expected to focus on trade amid rising tension between two global superpowers.

The trip to China is the first by an American president since Trump visited Beijing in 2017, soon after beginning his first term in office, and it comes less than a week after Sen. Maria Cantwell returned from a rare congressional delegation to China. In an interview, the Washington Democrat said the U.S.-China relationship "needs improvement" and the goal of the president's visit should be to get it "back on a productive track."

"We are the two biggest economies on the planet, and the two biggest economies on the planet have to communicate," Cantwell said. "Constricted trade between our countries hasn't been good."

Soon after Trump returned to office, he imposed taxes on Chinese goods that reached as high as 145%. China's government retaliated with its own tariffs on U.S. goods, leading to a stalemate that largely shut down trade between the countries until China threatened to stop exporting rare earth metals that U.S. companies need to produce the semiconductors that cars, aircraft and many other products rely on.

That forced the Trump administration to negotiate a truce in May 2025, and tariffs on Chinese imports are now similar to the tax rates Americans pay on goods from other countries, but trade between the United States and China is still reduced. Cantwell gave the example of cherries, about $34 million of which were exported to China last year, down from roughly $140 million in 2017.

China is also a key market for other Washington exports like seafood, potatoes, wheat, apples and pulses, Cantwell said. She recalled being blown away when she arrived in China and was served a meal of geoduck, oysters, Dungeness crab and other Washington seafood.

Cantwell was the sole Democrat in the delegation, which was led by Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, a Republican who worked in China and Hong Kong for Proctor & Gamble in the 1990s. Sens. Deb Fischer of Nebraska and Jerry Moran of Kansas traveled with them to Beijing and Shanghai, while Sen. Mike Lee of Utah joined for part of the trip, Cantwell said.

In Beijing, the senators met with Chinese Premier Li Qiang, Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Zhao Leji, chairman of the National People's Congress. Cantwell said their meetings focused on expanding trade between the countries but also touched on other topics, such as the fallout from the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and China's progress in regulating the export of precursor chemicals that are used to make fentanyl and other deadly opioids.

One of the U.S. executives who traveled to China with Trump is Kelly Ortberg, CEO of Boeing, the aerospace giant that was founded in Seattle and still employs about 65,000 people in Washington, according to the Seattle Times. Boeing has been in talks with China over a large aircraft sale, and Cantwell said one of her goals in her own trip was to "reinforce those opportunities to talk about Boeing and agricultural products from our state."

Cantwell is the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which has jurisdiction over the aviation industry.

Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Spokane Republican, took his own trip to China in September as part of a delegation of House lawmakers led by Rep. Adam Smith, a Bellevue Democrat. In an interview, Baumgartner said he welcomes the meetings between Trump and Xi, which are scheduled to begin Thursday morning in Beijing.

"The U.S.-China relationship is the most crucial relationship in the world, given that we're the world's two strongest countries," he said. "And naturally, there are some tensions in the relationship, as China seeks to supplant the U.S. as the world's strongest power and seeks to expand its influence, often in bullying and adversarial ways along the Pacific Rim."

Baumgartner said the U.S. delegation should press China's government to "play a more responsible role" with Russia - which relies on Chinese support to continue its war in Ukraine - and Iran, which has few close allies but depends heavily on selling oil and gas to China.

Trump was originally scheduled to visit Beijing in early April but delayed the trip due to the war he launched against Iran. After initially saying the war would be over in just a few weeks, the U.S. president has recently called for Americans to be patient despite rising gas prices and other economic pressure caused by the conflict, which has closed a vital waterway in the Persian Gulf.

Baumgartner, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was the first House Republican to visit China since 2019. While he has taken a firm approach to China's ascendance, the freshman lawmaker continues to advocate for more dialogue with the Chinese government and hosted his counterpart from the Foreign Affairs Committee of China's National People's Congress at his D.C. office in April.

Baumgartner said the Chinese lawmaker, Wang Chao, reported progress on cracking down on fentanyl precursors and improving lines of communication between the countries' militaries, two priorities they had discussed in September.

"The goal is not to be naive or to have rose-colored glasses with the Chinese, but we certainly do need to find accommodations and a way to have a peaceful coexistence between us and China," he said.

Before leaving the White House, Trump told reporters he planned to focus on trade during his trip. The U.S. president is also expected to seek China's help to pressure Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway whose closure has caused a global economic crisis.

Meanwhile, Xi and his fellow Chinese leaders are likely to push for Trump to change U.S. policy toward Taiwan, an island nation formed by the former Chinese government in 1949, after it was forced out of mainland China at the end of the Chinese Civil War. The U.S. government has long maintained a policy of "strategic ambiguity" toward Taiwan, saying it doesn't support Taiwanese independence even as it continues selling weapons to the country.

Trump has said he's willing to discuss U.S. arms sales to Taiwan with leaders in Beijing - already seen as a concession to China - but Xi would like the American president to publicly oppose Taiwanese independence.

Meetings between the American and Chinese leaders are scheduled for Thursday and Friday before Trump returns to the White House.

Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.

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