China Power | Diplomacy | East Asia

Why the US Strikes on Iran Won’t Derail the Trump-Xi Summit

The institutional machinery driving the Beijing summit is already too far advanced to reverse, and the Iran crisis has made holding it more urgent, not less.

U.S. President Donald Trump greets Chinese President Xi Jinping before a bilateral meeting at the Gimhae International Airport terminal in Busan, South Korea, Oct. 30, 2025,

Within hours of the United States and Israel launching “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran on February 28, timelines across the Washington policy world and the China-watching community converged on a single question: is U.S. President Donald Trump’s planned visit to Beijing, confirmed by the White House for March 31 to April 2, now dead?

The surface logic seemed persuasive. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi called the strikes “unacceptable,” condemning the killing of a sovereign leader and the incitement of regime change. Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning stated the operation “tramples on the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter.” 

External analysts extrapolated from there: CNBC asked whether a protracted Iran war might postpone the China visit. George Chen of the Asia Group questioned how China’s Xi Jinping could welcome Trump in a cheerful mood while the U.S. is actively at war with Iran.

However, the speculation reveals more about how the Western analytical community imagines Chinese decision-making than about how it actually works. The institutional logic that governs how Beijing processes external shocks and manages its diplomatic calendar signals that the summit will probably proceed. Not because Iran does not matter to Beijing, but because the machinery driving this visit operates on a fundamentally different track, one that external disruptions bend but rarely break.

The Institutional Conveyor Belt Is Already Moving

Those who have never worked inside the Chinese policy system tend to underestimate one of its most powerful features: institutional stickiness. A state visit of this magnitude is not a calendar entry that gets casually erased. It is the product of months of cross-ministry coordination involving the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Commerce, the National Development and Reform Commission, protocol offices, and embassies on both sides. 

On February 27, it was reported that Beijing had declared “all hands on deck,” with multiple departments tasked with researching Trump’s likely demands and formulating possible concessions. Agreements were already being mapped out across energy, aviation, and agricultural purchases. 

The Chinese embassy in Washington was activated as a channel; academics and former officials were tapped to gauge Trump’s thinking. A senior delegation led by Wu Ken, president of the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs, traveled to the United States in early February to meet American counterparts – including Evan Greenberg, executive vice chairman of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, an interlocutor Trump himself appointed to a White House trade advisory committee during his first term. 

Chinese policy voices reinforce this reading. Henry Wang, president of the Center for China and Globalization, argued on Bloomberg that the Iran crisis makes the summit more urgent, not less – that the two countries “should really talk to each other and find a way to stabilize the global situation.” 

Wu Xinbo at Fudan University has been publicly flagging the prospect of a “grand deal” in domestic-facing commentary. It is the kind of language a senior Chinese policy-scholar deploys only when he senses the leadership is thinking in those terms. 

Wang Jisi of Peking University co-published a major Foreign Affairs article with an American counterpart, a move that in China’s academic-diplomatic ecosystem functions less as independent commentary than as carefully calibrated track-two groundwork laid with leadership awareness. 

This is what institutional pre-loading looks like in the Chinese system. The entire bureaucratic ecosystem is already in motion, with ministries, think tanks, and academics close to ministries competing to place deliverables on the summit table, and individuals staking access and reputation on outcomes. Shutting this machinery down would require an affirmative decision at the very top and would send precisely the signal of strategic indecision the system is designed to avoid.

The most telling evidence that the institutional track remains intact came on March 3, when Bloomberg reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Vice Premier He Lifeng are slated to meet in Paris around mid-March to prepare summit deliverables. Bloomberg explicitly framed this as a signal that the planned summit “is pushing ahead despite American strikes against Iran.” Those who understand the Chinese system know the Bessent-He meeting is a waypoint on a carefully sequenced path leading to the summit itself.

The Top-Down System Absorbs Shocks

When an external shock like Operation Epic Fury hits, it is processed by China’s bureaucratic apparatus as operational input. The system extracts lessons, calibrates messaging, and makes targeted amendments to the existing plan. Think of a large vessel adjusting course by a few degrees in response to a crosswind, not executing a U-turn.

History confirms this pattern with striking........

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