Trump greets China’s Xi in rare airport welcome to kick off three-day state visit

WASHINGTON - Xi Jinping was personally greeted by Donald Trump as he landed in the United States for his first state visit in 11 years – an unprecedented welcome to America for a Chinese leader.

Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan, a celebrated soprano, touched down at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington shortly before 6pm on Sept 23 (6am Sept 24 Singapore time).

Trump shook hands with the couple, becoming the first US president in around six decades to receive a foreign counterpart at that airport, excluding visits by the Pope.

That gesture of courtesy at the base in Maryland, home to Air Force One, will be followed on the morning of Sept 24 by a state arrival ceremony hosted by Trump, according to an itinerary released by the White House. The occasion will feature 479 military personnel to mark an event it called “a significant milestone” in ties between the world’s largest economies.

“It’s remarkable that Trump is going so out of his way to accord this kind of respect for America’s chief geopolitical rival,” said Jonathan Czin, who served as China director at the National Security Council during the Biden administration, and is now with the Brookings think tank. “It is not clear what, if anything, Trump is getting from Xi in exchange for these many gestures of respect.”

Typically, presidents meet foreign counterparts at the White House for a formal arrival ceremony. During Xi’s state visit to the capital in 2015, his plane was met by then Vice-President Joe Biden. Trump is the first American president to greet a Chinese leader on the tarmac in recent memory.

That break from protocol gives Beijing a powerful visual opportunity to present China as an equal peer to the US for domestic audiences.

Xi is visiting Washington having used China’s stranglehold on rare earths to extract concessions from Trump during last year’s tariff war. China is now seeking to extend the two countries’ fragile trade truce and buy itself more time to build tech self-sufficiency.

The US also wants to keep the trade truce intact, though officials are said to be seeking a shorter extension – an outcome Trump could use to wield leverage over Beijing. In addition, the president is seeking to advance commitments on purchases of agricultural goods and aircraft, as well as establish a line of communication on artificial intelligence.

Expectations for major breakthroughs remain low. Deep divisions remain between the superpowers on issues from trade and Taiwan to their race in AI. Xi is no longer expected to bring an entourage of Chinese executives, dimming prospects for the kind of headline business deals favoured by Trump.

Underscoring the tensions, the Chinese government has taken possession of potentially sensitive F-35 stealth aircraft parts that were inexplicably diverted to Hong Kong, people briefed on the matter said – an incident that might come up in summit talks.

The last time a US president welcomed a world leader besides the Pope at Joint Base Andrews was in 1962, when John F. Kennedy greeted then British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a longstanding ally that fought alongside America in two world wars. A better parallel may be the reception given by Dwight D. Eisenhower to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 during the Cold War.

“The contrast in ambition is stark,” said Bloomberg Economics’ Adam Farrar. “Eisenhower welcomed Khrushchev hoping to change the trajectory of the Cold War. Trump is rolling out the red carpet for Xi for a summit focused more on managing tensions than resolving them.”

When Trump visited Beijing in May, he was greeted at the airport by Chinese Vice-President Han Zheng, as well as a military honour guard and hundreds of flag-waving children. The next day, Xi waited for him on the forecourt of the Great Hall of the People off Tiananmen Square.

“This to me seems like a clear case of the White House breaking past customs to get the summit started with a powerful gesture of respect to Xi Jinping to set the mood,” said Joseph Torigian, a China scholar at American University in Washington and author of a biography of Xi’s father. “It fits with President Trump’s belief that much of international politics is about personal relationships.”

In recent years, Xi has received a similar airport welcome from leaders including North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. In 2025, Trump greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin on the tarmac of an air base in Alaska for a high-stakes summit focused on the war in Ukraine.

Julian Gewirtz, a former Biden administration official who’s now at Columbia University, said Trump was displaying “extraordinary deference” towards Xi.

“In the history of US-China relations, a state visit to Washington was traditionally something Beijing sought, and which the US used as leverage,” he added. “The dynamic almost seems reversed: Xi is giving Trump the spectacle he wants, while the substantive gains for America remain entirely unclear.” BLOOMBERG