WASHINGTON — President Trump has taken rare measures to ensure that Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his delegation, including Chinese First Lady Peng Liyuan, are hosted with the pomp of the highest order for VIPs making a state visit to Washington.On Wednesday, Trump personally welcomed Xi at Joint Base Andrews when the Chinese leader landed, with a state arrival ceremony featuring 479 military personnel and a multi-aircraft flyover.Later today, Trump plans to host a state dinner for Xi and Peng that, according to a senior U.S.
official, will include American executives including Tesla's Elon Musk, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google's Sundar Pichai, and Nvidia's Jensen Huang."Trump will show Xi courtesy and respect.The symbolism will account for a large amount of the substance of the visit," said Ryan Haas, Director of the China Center at the Brookings Institution.
"The summit is designed to signal that Trump and Xi have a strong relationship, and through that relationship, the two leaders can manage differences within mutually tolerable bounds."In between the various ceremonies, the two leaders will hold a tightly scheduled day of meetings where Trump and Xi are expected to talk about artificial intelligence, rare earths, trade and geopolitics such as Iran and Taiwan.On the AI front, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that Washington and Beijing are discussing ways to warn each other about AI incidents that pose national security risks.AI executives in the U.S.
have warned each other in recent weeks to slow down their development of the technology in order to ensure public safety.In a response to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," a spokesperson for China's government dismissed the proposal as unfair, accusing the call for safety rules as an attempt to hold back Chinese competition.For its part, China's AI industry is backed by hundreds of billions in state-led funds and a government that has said that AI-powered technolog...