What's at stake for trade, Taiwan and Iran in Trump's high-risk summit with China's Xi

U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping as they hold a bilateral meeting at Gimhae International Airport, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, in Busan, South Korea, October 30, 2025. Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters President Donald Trump 's face-to-face meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping is a high-stakes meeting full of risk along with reward. The meetings in Beijing, set for Thursday and Friday, could be a watershed moment for the adversarial superpowers, whose fragile relationship has been snarled up by a flurry of economic and political conflicts in the past year alone. The lingering Iran war and a longstanding dispute over Taiwan are also expected to loom large over Trump and Xi's discussions. Each of those thorny issues affects not just Washington and Beijing, but the rest of the world. "The stakes are extraordinarily high," said Professor Arthur Dong , a China expert and professor of strategy and economics at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. Trump is leaning into the hype. "Great things will happen for both Countries!" he wrote in a Truth Social post Monday. For China, however, Trump's visit is just the latest in a series of high-profile meetings with implications for geopolitics. An Iranian official met with his Chinese counterparts in Beijing last week, and Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to visit the city days after Trump leaves.