Talks are underway for a U.S.-China summit this spring, with the choice of venue crucial to balancing Trump’s unpredictability and Xi’s preference for control. Hawaii and Hainan stand out as potential neutral sites, offering luxury, security, and a level playing field for both leaders.
On April 6, 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump meet at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, the U.S..(File photo)
Talks about a possible U.S.-China summit later this spring are already underway, and if it’s to happen by June, it’s none too soon. Summits involve a great deal of logistics work, political choreography and excruciatingly tight security, though the respective capital cities of Washington, DC and Beijing host summits frequently enough to be well-prepared and well-versed in what it takes. The great cities of New York and Shanghai, while not typically centers of bilateral diplomacy, are also veteran venues in the summit game.
For a variety of reasons, perhaps most central of which is the utter unpredictability of U.S. President Donald Trump, and the rather more control-conscious manner of Xi Jinping, it’s worth comparing potential summit locations with an eye to finding a fairly level playing field.
The first question that comes up is who is going to play host, and who is going to play honored visitor?
Playing host has many advantages, not the least of which is its resonance with traditional Chinese diplomacy harking back to imperial times when it was not only considered natural but necessary that representatives of foreign lands should make the pilgrimage to the Chinese capital.
While the summitry of World War II is a complex topic in its own right, it might be noted that Stalin’s refusal to go anywhere he couldn’t go by train put the onus on Churchill, Roosevelt, and later Truman, to do the lion’s share of travelling, resulting in summits, such as Yalta and Potsdam, which played to Stalin’s advantage in terms of security and logistics.
In modern times, Richard Nixon’s breakthrough journey to Beijing allowed for a series of meetings to be held mostly on China’s terms (and never for a minute was there any reciprocal notion that Mao should go to the U.S.). This posed a diplomatic challenge, but the U.S. side artfully flipped the script, making the most of Nixon’s inherently disadvantaged position as petitioner to the great leader by billing the fraught journey to a far away land as a Marco Polo moment of discovery.
The TV coverage favored Nixon, and not just because Nixon had the American press in tow. Given stark differences in age, vigor, restless energy, Nixon’s knack for playing to the camera—even if the smile he flashed was not always real—served him well. He strode on the Great Wall and jetted around China, while his ailing counterpart could hardly get out of his armchair. The meeting might have been on Mao’s timing and on Mao’s terms, but the U.S. president comes out of the summit looking, well, presidential, and that’s how it played back home.
Since then, China and the U.S. have had 16 summit-style meetings between their top leaders, starting with Deng Xiaoping’s wildly successful state visit to the U.S. in 1979, and culminating most recently in 2023 with the low-key Xi and Biden meeting on the side of the San Francisco APEC extravaganza.
Given the rough parity of the number of times each country has hosted the other, it remains negotiable, if not up for grabs, where the next summit should be held.
Xi met with Obama in an informal summit in Sunnylands, California in 2013 and travelled to the U.S. again for a formal state visit during Obama’s tenure in Washington, DC in 2015. However it’s not an exaggeration to say that Obama era diplomacy doesn’t count for much to Trump, and so it is Xi’s visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in Florida that is the most important precedent for the U.S. planning team going forward.
The summit, held in the president’s private resort residence, had the kind of confusing soft-news optics typical of Trump, in which China’s leader was treated to “delicious” chocolate cake in a convivial party atmosphere while the real news was U.S. bombing Syria at the same time. Xi ate the cake, but otherwise did not bite, remaining aloof and avoiding commitments, perhaps wisely, given the hard press of Trump’s flagrant home court advantage.
The next summit between the two men was in Beijing in 2017, dubbed a “state visit plus” in a way that was geared to take Trump’s not inconsiderable ego into account. As it transpired, both sides turned on the charm, but China clearly won the match. Trump played the Nixon card, flattering his host at every turn, but as they say, Trump is no Nixon nor had he a Kissinger to guide him, so he ended up expending a great deal of political capital for nothing.
China trumped up the royal angle, treating the honored guest to an “unprecedented” personal visit to the Forbidden City, by which Trump was unwittingly fulfilling the ancient Chinese script of paying obeisance to the emperors in the ancient palace. Played like putty in the hands of China’s skilled and quietly supercilious diplomatic corps, it was a public relations win for Xi in which Trump got no concessions nor any increase in political stature.
Biden did not visit Beijing as president, but he did so as vice-president in 2011. Biden held two significant meetings on third country soil with Xi. The first was a much-heralded side parley in Bali, Indonesia at the G-20 meet of 2022. The second side meeting was in Lima, Peru at the APEC summit in November 2024, during the lame duck stage of Biden’s presidency.
As such, the only summit of substance was the seemingly hastily arranged closed door session for Xi at the Filoli House in Woodside, California during an interlude in the APEC 2023 meet in San Francisco. It also stands as the most recent instance of the U.S. “hosting” the Chinese leader.
But given Trump’s withering disrespect for his predecessor, Biden’s summitry, even when it’s good, doesn’t count for much.
So whose turn is it now?
And where?
Beijing and DC rule the roost if the summit is to be a full-Monty state visit, but Shanghai and New York are very adequate alternative sites with considerable experience hosting international meetings. San Francisco and LA, as well as Hangzhou and Xi’an, are all appropriate locations with experience in summit style meetups.
But given the big egos and bilateral difficulties of the moment, maybe it’s time to think out of the box. How about Alaska? It is a fair choice in terms of the nearly equal distance traveled, but the last important Sino-U.S. meeting there, a special session held between foreign affairs officials of the two countries, was a diplomatic train wreck. Among other things, the Chinese side complained about attitude, inadequate food and lodging, so Anchorage can count itself out for now.
Guangzhou, and even Guam, are remote possibilities, but neither offer anything close to a level playing field.
That’s why Hawaii and Hainan come to mind. Hawaii is not a diplomatic center, but it certainly is a hub for the hotel business, and like Alaska, the location is amenable in the sense that it’s actually a slightly shorter flying distance to China’s capital than it is to DC.
Hainan in recent years has gained experience as a hub for regional meetings, notably the Boao Forum, and in terms of hotel infrastructure, good weather and the like, offers many of the same advantages as Hawaii. It might be noted that the perpetually tan Trump, in his long and variegated life as a real estate developer, hotelier and entertainment maven, has a strong predilection for fancy, luxurious facilities and snazzy seaside locations (Plaza Hotel, Trump Atlantic City casinos and of course Mar-a-Lago come to mind).
The seaside theme is further underscored (leaving the political insanity of the suggestions aside) by Trump’s stated interest in developing Gaza as one big beach resort, which echoes his earlier, equally improbable fanciful thinking about developing North Korea’s “beautiful” coastline.
But perhaps the real core location at the center of any Trump-Xi summit is the whereabouts of Trump’s ego, that is to say, arranging things in a way that are sufficiently pleasing to the easily offended American president. It’s critical for world peace that there not be a repeat of the debacle of February 28, 2025, when Trump discarded all diplomatic decency to threaten, browbeat and humiliate Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office.
Like it or not, Trump’s thin-skinned tendency to go off script if he feels insulted, annoyed, challenged or dismissed in any way means it is imperative for his wannabe interlocutors to pre-emptively placate him so as to keep his behavior within the norms usually associated with state leaders. Macron’s meeting with Trump provides a successful example of this, but it took a great deal of cajoling and glad-handing.
As the much-vaunted paramount leader of China, Xi Jinping has no trouble matching Trump as a man with a will to power. But his preference for order and penchant for control puts him in an uncomfortable position should there be a significant deviation from scripted protocol and diplomatic norms.
The Mar-a-Lago summit went without a major hitch because Xi Jinping was patient and able to maintain a dignified measure of self-control. The Beijing summit that followed further indicates that China’s diplomatic corps knows what it takes to deal with “the Donald.”
However, Trump II is looking sufficiently different from Trump I, so previous lessons learned might not suffice. When it comes to predicting the behavior of the mercurial ex-casino magnate, all bets are off.
