President Donald Trump announced Tuesday (March 17) that he is delaying his planned trip to China by “five or six weeks,” pushing back a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping that had been scheduled for March 31 to April 2.
The delay comes as President Trump pressures Beijing and NATO allies to help the United States reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a critical oil route disrupted by the ongoing conflict with Iran. The strait carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily oil supply, and Washington has called on several countries, including China, to send warships to help clear the passage.
Trump first signaled the possible delay in a Sunday interview with the Financial Times, saying he expected China to help unblock the strait before he traveled to Beijing. He noted that the two weeks remaining before the meeting was a “long time” and that Washington wanted clarity first.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking to CNBC‘s Brian Sullivan in Paris on Monday (March 16) after meeting with his Chinese counterpart He Lifeng, suggested the delay would be driven by logistics rather than diplomatic pressure. “If the meeting, for some reason, is rescheduled, it would be rescheduled because of logistics,” Bessent said.
The Beijing trip would have been the first visit to China by a U.S. president since President Trump’s own trip during his first term in 2017. It was also set to build on a meeting between Trump and Xi held last October in the South Korean city of Busan, where the two leaders agreed to a one-year truce in their trade war.
According to The Washington Post, the delay throws into question a long-planned effort to reset relations between the world’s two largest economies, arriving at an already tense moment. Earlier this month, Chinese top diplomat Wang Yi had said the agenda for the summit was already “on the table.”
Trade tensions between Washington and Beijing have also sharpened ahead of the summit. As Reuters reported, the U.S. launched trade investigations into a broad range of countries over alleged excess capacity and failures to address forced labor. China’s commerce ministry fired back Monday, calling the probes “extremely unilateral, arbitrary and discriminatory” and urging Washington to “meet China halfway.”
No new date for the summit has been officially confirmed. Beijing has yet to formally announce a rescheduled timeline, and the White House has not specified when discussions about a new date will begin.
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