Opinion: why the Xi-Trump summit in Florida will be one for the history books

And so, at long last, Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet his unconventional and bombastic US counterpart Donald Trump. The two leaders will meet at an informal summit hosted on Thursday and Friday at Trump’s estate in Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. With the stakes as high as ever in the relationship between the world’s foremost superpower and its burgeoning rival, the Mar-a-Lago summit stands to be historic.

Although neither side has exactly clarified the agenda for the Trump-Xi talks, we already have a good idea of what topics the two leaders may be broaching. First, Trump took to Twitter last week, as is his trademark, to set out a “first offer” of sorts for Xi: “The meeting next week with China will be a very difficult one in that we can no longer have massive trade deficits and job losses. American companies must be prepared to look at other alternatives,” he said.

Trump, the self-proclaimed master negotiator, has laid down the line for Xi that “massive trade deficits” will no longer be tolerable. Incidentally, on Friday, the office of the United States Trade Representative released its 2017 National Trade Estimate Report, which outlines a range of Chinese anticompetitive and unfair trade practices, ranging from continued complaints over excess capacity to online piracy to cybersecurity.

Chinese official representatives have so far said little of substance on how they plan to handle the Trump administration’s almost dogmatic commitment to enforce existing trade deals and crack down on what are perceived as a deeply unfair trade balance. Chinese State Councillor Yang Jiechi has met with Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, with the two vowing to maintain a “mutually beneficial economic relationship between the two largest economies in the world”. Either way, the issue of trade promises to sit at the top of the US agenda when Xi comes to Mar-a-Lago.

Second, expect North Korea to appear on the agenda. During the presidential transition, Trump, who was famously averse to receiving intelligence briefings at the frequency of former presidents-elect, specifically requested briefings on North Korea, suggesting a notable degree of presidential interest in the topic. Despite the complexity of the North Korean problem today, with the country’s parallel nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programmes marching on, Trump sees China as the source of a solution.