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Beijing is weighing plans to send a group of top tech, electric vehicle and aerospace executives to accompany Chinese President Xi Jinping to Washington later this month, as the two sides race to finalise details for the closely watched visit.
The South China Morning Post first reported on August 28 that Chinese and US officials were negotiating whether business leaders would join Xi’s delegation to the US. However, details about who might be included have not been previously reported.
According to sources, while specifics of the delegation are still being ironed out, China has approached the selection with the aim of modelling the American CEO delegation that followed US President Donald Trump to China earlier this year.
This meant that the Chinese delegation was expected to comprise business leaders from the tech, finance, EV and aerospace sectors, they said.
One source familiar with the matter said China had yet to formally commit to bringing any business leaders to Washington with Xi. But both Beijing and Washington were treating every aspect of the visit as a matter of reciprocity, including the composition of the business delegation.


When Trump travelled to Beijing in May, more than a dozen top American CEOs joined him, including the heads of Tesla, Apple, Nvidia and Boeing.
Another source said that top Chinese tech executives would be on the list, with a networking event for business leaders on the agenda during Xi’s visit, which is planned to run from September 23 to 25.
According to that source, several Chinese tycoons expected to be part of the delegation have yet to be granted US visas, with Beijing urging Washington to expedite the approval process.
The sources, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to publicly comment on the issue, said a Chinese delegation accompanying Xi would be “more about optics than concrete deliverables”, pointing to friction over Chinese investment in the US.
The summit will be Xi’s second with Trump this year, but expectations for a breakthrough remain low. The meeting comes amid escalating tensions between the two powers over artificial intelligence (AI), with Washington scrutinising how Chinese firms gain access to advanced chips and accusing Chinese developers of copying leading US models.
Beijing has firmly rejected US allegations of “aggressive, malicious” AI distillation as groundless and warned that it will retaliate if Washington uses the claims as a pretext to curb China’s development of the technology, which is closing the gap with the US.
The two rival economies have also traded tit-for-tat measures in recent weeks, with the US Federal Communications Commission banning the import and sale of new foreign-made robotic devices and power inverters, sectors in which China is a global leader.
Washington also added more than 40 Chinese companies to its Uygur Forced Labour Prevention Act entity list the same month. Beijing retaliated by tightening export controls on drones and sanctioning seven American firms.
Negotiations on pending issues could go down to the wire. The sources said Beijing and Washington were planning a meeting between Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng and US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in the coming days, shortly before Xi’s trip.
That would reflect the timing of the pair’s last meeting, held in Seoul just days before Trump landed in Beijing in May. Bessent and He used those talks to work through thorny economic and trade issues, widely seen at the time as a prelude to the Xi-Trump summit that followed.
The sources said that this time, He and Bessent were expected to discuss key deliverables of the May summit: an artificial intelligence dialogue and the Boards of Trade and Investment, mechanisms to manage commercial flows and investment access.
They added that while there might be some progress on trade negotiations, talks on the Board of Investment had stalled amid strong pushback from Washington. One source said Beijing had hoped Washington would draw up a list of industries open to Chinese investment, but Washington favoured a case-by-case review.
The source said that both Beijing and Washington viewed Xi’s reciprocal visit to Washington very seriously, seeing it as an important opportunity to stabilise relations.
Another source said that only the Board of Trade was likely to produce a deliverable.
The SCMP reported last month that efforts to get the trade board up and running were in the final stages, focusing on identifying non-sensitive sectors and products eligible for tariff-reduced trade capped at US$30 billion for each side.
Citing sources, the report added that Beijing and Washington were also working towards extending a trade truce reached in Busan in October 2025, but that both sides disagreed over how long that extension should be.
A separate SCMP report said the Board of Investment was unlikely to be among the deliverables for the Xi-Trump summit in Washington as neither side was ready for discussions with the private sector.
Analysts have attributed the lack of progress to differing views in the Trump administration and Congress on the benefits and risks of more Chinese foreign direct investment in the US.
Last month, when Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met David Perdue, the US ambassador to Beijing, he said the US-China relationship faced risks and challenges and called on both sides to “remove disruptions and overcome obstacles for high-level exchanges”.
Asked about that meeting on Thursday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun stressed that head-of-state diplomacy played an “irreplaceable strategic guiding role” in US-China relations, adding that both countries had maintained communication regarding arrangements for exchanges between their leaders this year.


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Sources say business leaders are expected to travel to Washington, but the plans may be ‘more about optics’ than concrete results


Sources say business leaders are expected to travel to Washington, but the plans may be ‘more about optics’ than concrete results.


.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Sources say business leaders are expected to travel to Washington, but the plans may be ‘more about optics’ than concrete results

Sources say business leaders are expected to travel to Washington, but the plans may be ‘more about optics’ than concrete results