Five takeaways from the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing so far

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping attend a bilateral meeting at the Great Hall of the People on May 14, 2026 in Beijing, China. Alex Wong | News | The U.S. and China agreed to forge more cooperative ties at their summit in Beijing on Thursday, in a high-stakes meeting full of friendly gestures between two countries that have been battling for years on issues ranging from intellectual property and human rights to technology and trade. Here are five key points, based on Chinese President Xi Jinping's readout of the meeting. 1. New positioning Xi and U.S. President Donald Trump agreed to develop a "constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability," according to Beijing's official English readout of the summit. Beijing will treat this as the guiding framework for the next three years and beyond, he said. The strategic positioning would be led by cooperation and "measured competition" with manageable differences, Xi said, according to the readout, while stressing that the framework must be translated into concrete actions. "It signals a period of 'managed stability' that will hold for some time," said Tianchen Xu, senior economist at Economist Intelligence Unit. While frictions are due to persist, "there will be a guardrail, and things won't spiral out of the two sides' control as they nearly did in 2025." 2. …