By Vina Nadjibulla

September 20, 2026

When Xi Jinping’s plane touches down at Joint Base Andrews this week, Donald Trump intends to be there to meet it.

Protocol dictates that American presidents do not usually greet foreign leaders at the airport; they receive them at the White House. The last exception occurred when President Barack Obama met Pope Francis at Andrews in 2015.

The unusual gesture says something about the importance Trump attaches to his second summit with Xi this year and about the imagery Beijing has long sought of dealing with Washington as a great-power equal. It also attests to the evolution of a shifting great-power relationship that Canada is watching with vigilant interest.

The timing matters too. With the U.S. midterm elections only weeks away, Trump has a strong incentive to demonstrate tangible economic wins.

Expectations for major breakthroughs, however, remain low.

Xi’s state visit, which begins Wednesday and ends Friday, will be heavy on ceremony, including a military review and a state dinner filled with American business and tech executives. The most likely outcome is an extension of the tactical stability reached at the last summit rather than a structural change in the relationship.

At the centre of the negotiations is the trade truce reached in Busan last year, which expires on November 10. Both sides want to extend the truce, but Beijing is pushing for an agreement that would run through the end of Trump’s term, while Washington favours a shorter extension and argues that China has yet to fully meet its commitments on rare-earth export permits and flows.

The two sides are also discussing reciprocal tariff reductions on roughly US$30 billion in “non-strategic” trade, greater Chinese purchases of American agricultural products and aircraft, and new arrangements through the bilateral Board of Trade.

Energy is another area to watch. Beijing imposed a 15-per-cent tariff on American LNG in February 2025, effectively shutting U.S. cargoes out of the Chinese market. Washington now wants that tariff reduced or removed just as another large wave of American LNG export capacity is coming online. China is the world’s largest LNG importer, making renewed access particularly valuable to U.S. producers.

None of these deals would resolve the structural competition between the two countries. They do, however, illustrate how transactional that competition has become. Washington and Beijing are looking for bargains where their immediate interests coincide even as their rivalry over technology, industrial power and security continues.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will provide another test of how far that pragmatism can extend.

The two governments have begun exploring an AI safety dialogue, but expectations should be modest. They distrust one another and approach the risks of AI from different political and strategic starting points.

Beijing’s latest public framing has emphasized threats to political and ideological stability. This month, China’s Ministry of State Security warned that generative AI could be used for deepfakes, disinformation and “cognitive warfare” aimed at undermining the Chinese political system and Communist Party rule.

Much of the U.S. debate, by contrast, has focused on catastrophic risks from increasingly capable models, cybersecurity and the possibility of advanced systems escaping human control. Trump has resisted calls for stronger regulation, arguing that slowing U.S. development risks handing the advantage to China.

That leaves scope for dialogue, but probably little more than crisis communication, technical exchanges and minimum safeguards against particularly dangerous uses of AI. Even those matter, however, because the United States and China are the two leading AI powers, and the rules — or absence of rules — governing their competition will shape the environment in which every other country develops its own technology policy.

For Canada, the importance of the summit is much more than symbolic — it is immediate and actionable. Ottawa is managing difficult and unfinished negotiations with Washington while simultaneously expanding its relationship with Beijing.

The Canada-US-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) and the integrated North American economy remain fundamental to Canadian prosperity even as bilateral trade negotiations with Washington remain stalled. At the same time, Canada’s economic relationship with China is expanding.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s January visit to Beijing reopened high-level engagement and produced a preliminary agreement covering canola, seafood, electric vehicles.

Canadian exports to China rose 30.1 per cent in the first half of 2026 to a record C$21.74 billion, driven heavily by energy, while agricultural exports increased by 1.9 per cent.

The presence of major Chinese state-backed institutions — including China Investment Corporation and China International Capital Corporation — at this month’s Canada Investment Summit was another sign that the agenda is broadening from trade toward investment as well.

What Trump and Xi agree to this week will shape the environment in which Canada conducts its own negotiations with Beijing this fall, while also managing its still-unresolved trade relationship with Washington.

However, China’s temporary tariff relief on canola meal, peas, lobster and crab expires at the end of this year, while discussions over Chinese investments in Canada, including in the auto sector, are still developing.

Carney will return to China for the APEC Leaders’ Summit in Shenzhen in November, where the two sides will have an opportunity to extend and consolidate elements of the January agreement. What Trump and Xi agree to this week will shape the environment in which Canada conducts its own negotiations with Beijing this fall, while also managing its still-unresolved trade relationship with Washington.

Autos are perhaps the clearest example. Canada aligned with the Biden administration in 2024 when it imposed a 100-per-cent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles. In January, Ottawa took a different course, agreeing to an initial annual quota of 49,000 Chinese EVs at the normal 6.1-per-cent most favoured nation (MFN) tariff and explicitly linking the opening to the possibility of Chinese investment in Canadian auto manufacturing.

Trump has now signalled that he too could be open to Chinese automakers building vehicles in the United States if they employ American workers. That idea faces substantial resistance from the U.S. auto industry and members of both parties in Congress. But the debate itself demonstrates how quickly American China policy can move between restriction, bargaining and selective economic openness.

For Canada, this is another reminder that its China policy can no longer be built around alignment with Washington. However, that does not mean the concerns that drove closer Canada-U.S. alignment under the Biden administration have disappeared. Chinese industrial overcapacity, economic coercion, and China’s dominance of critical-mineral processing remain serious concerns for Canada, as well as for allies in Europe and partners across the Indo-Pacific.

Europe’s hardening debate on China deserves especially closer attention in Canada. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned last week that the EU’s €1-billion-a-day trade deficit with China is unsustainable and that the “second China shock” is not looming but already hitting European factories and industrial heartlands. Brussels has given its dialogue with Beijing until October to produce tangible progress on trade imbalances and market access.

But China is doubling down on an economic model centred on advanced manufacturing, industrial upgrading and export competitiveness, even as weak domestic demand continues to fuel tensions with major trading partners. That makes significant voluntary rebalancing unlikely. If dialogue fails to deliver, von der Leyen has said the EU is prepared to use “all the tools at our disposal” to defend its economic interests and reduce strategic dependencies.

This makes China policy an increasingly important area for Canada-EU coordination. With the bilateral relationship deepening and the next Canada-EU summit at the end of October, Ottawa and Brussels should be comparing approaches more closely on overcapacity, industrial policy, critical minerals, investment screening and economic coercion.

The objective is not an identical China policy. It is greater coordination in confronting a common strategic problem: how to remain open economies while preventing concentrated dependencies from eroding freedom of action.

Carney’s address to the European Parliament offered the beginnings of an answer. He argued that sovereignty today depends on secure access to capabilities ranging from energy and defence to AI, semiconductors and critical minerals, and that neither Canada nor Europe can close those gaps alone. “The objective is not self-sufficiency,” he said. “It is collective resilience.”

AI offers an early example of what this can look like. Canada cannot match the scale of the American or Chinese technology ecosystems on its own. But it can retain important capabilities at home while pooling investment, infrastructure and expertise with trusted partners.

The new Canada-Germany Sovereign Technology Alliance is built around precisely that logic, while Canada is also discussing with Germany, France, Australia, the United Kingdom and others opportunities for closer cooperation around AI safety and security.

The environment in which Canada is trying to build greater strategic autonomy and resilience will continue to be shaped by decisions made in Washington and Beijing.

That brings us back to this week’s summit. Trump and Xi are learning to bargain within a relationship that remains fundamentally competitive, trading concessions where their interests align while continuing to compete across technology, industrial power and security.

Whatever arrangements they reach will reflect American and Chinese priorities, but the consequences will extend well beyond either country.

The challenge for Canada is not to position itself somewhere between Beijing and Washington. It is to preserve enough agency to manage both relationships on its own terms.

That requires stronger domestic capabilities, more diversified markets and deeper coordination with Europe and Indo-Pacific partners facing many of the same pressures.

Policy Contributing Writer Vina Nadjibulla is co-founder and CEO of the Centre for Strategic Statecraft and a Balsillie Scholar at the Balsillie School of International Affairs.