Trump confirms President Xi will arrive in Washington for state visit

President Xi Jinping will travel to Washington, D.C. next week for his first state visit to the US in 11 years. Separately, sources say Vice Premier He Lifeng is set to meet with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent over the weekend on wide-ranging topics including trade, artificial intelligence and rare earths.

US President Donald Trump was in Beijing earlier in May and during his first term for talks with his Chinese counterpart.

According to senior US government officials, Trump is expected to be at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington to greet Xi upon his arrival on Wednesday.

The heart of the highly-anticipated summit comes the next day at an arrival ceremony on the State Floor of the White House for Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan, who will also participate in a review of troops in the Rose Garden.

Closed-door talks will take place between the two heads of state, while their spouses hold a separate engagement.

Xi and Peng are also invited to attend Thursday's state dinner in the East Room as guests of honour.

Yet, much to Trump's dismay, he tells reporters that the 1,000-person ballroom added onto the White House remains under construction which precludes its debut for the impending gala.

Trump says, "He'll be here next week. I can tell you this is too bad we don't have the ballroom open because if we did, we could have, we'd have thousands, we could add 2,000 people having dinner."

Some of the Republican president's tech industry friends are reportedly on the invitation list. This includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Trump continues to laud bilateral ties and says a lot of agreements will be signed in the talks.

"We get along well, we are doing very well with China. We're gonna have a lot of different deals here, we intend, we're not just doing it for our health. We have some pretty important meetings."

Meanwhile, the commerce ministry states Vice Premier He Lifeng is heading a delegation to New York for economic and trade consultations with the US from Saturday to next Wednesday that will explore possible areas for Trump and Xi to agree on.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who took part in previous rounds of trade talks with China, will join Bessent on Sunday.

Bessent has indicated that he expects their meetings to cover both open- and closed-weight AI models and has urged both countries to agree on establishing "guardrails" to keep the technology out of the hands of malign non-state actors.

Other topics of discussion include potential extension of a tariff truce that expires on November 10 as well as improving rare earth flows that China severely curbed last year.