The ‘striking’ difference in how Trump and Xi used their invisible summit

September 26, 2026 — 6:15am

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The many American business and technology titans invited to the White House state dinner on Thursday night – Jeff Bezos, David Ellison and Jamie Dimon among them – mostly had each other for company.

There was no delegation of Chinese business executives on the trip, as there was on Xi Jinping’s last state visit to Washington in 2015.

It was one of the many signs that this summit was unlikely to elicit substantial outcomes – commercially at least – other than photographs.

That has largely proven to be true. Little change has emerged from the meetings so far, except for a two-month extension to the trade truce brokered last year in Busan (it now expires in January) and a renewed AI dialogue.

US trade ambassador Jamieson Greer promised more announcements on Monday, while Donald Trump signalled good news for American farmers, though he has said that before.

He also continued his pitch to rebrand artificial intelligence as “super intelligence”, but there was no obvious outcome on AI regulation. The White House had only released a perfunctory one-sentence readout at the time of writing.

Evan Feigenbaum, vice president of studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a leading voice on Asia, said the affair was “long on performance, short on substance”.

But, he added, “that doesn’t mean there won’t be substance, because they’re going to meet two more times this year. That’s really unprecedented.”

Having already met in Beijing in May, Trump and Xi are due to see each other again at the APEC summit in Shenzhen in November, and at the G20 in Miami before Christmas.

Feigenbaum said one would ordinarily........

© The Sydney Morning Herald