WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. _ President Donald Trump has arrived in South Florida for his first face-to-face meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping, armed with a full agenda of U.S. concerns but only modest expectations for results.
Trump and Xi will huddle on the grounds of the president's Mar-a-Lago estate, beginning Thursday night with a dinner that includes their wives. More formal discussions are expected Friday on a range of economic issues and, more significantly, worries about North Korea's stepped-up pace of nuclear development and ballistic missile tests.
"I think China will be stepping up," Trump told reporters traveling with him Thursday aboard Air Force One ahead of the meetings.
Trump said he expected the meetings to focus most heavily on North Korea, but also trade.
"We have been treated unfairly and have made terrible trade deals with China for many, many years," he said.
Summits between U.S. and Chinese leaders are typically tightly choreographed affairs, with the agenda and even public statements scripted long before the first meeting. Years of planning went into what the White House touted as an informal "shirt sleeves summit" between President Barack Obama and Xi at the Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage in 2013.
But U.S. officials have emphasized that kind of detailed preparation isn't the case for this summit. Their Chinese counterparts have said little about the meeting altogether.
"There's going to be a very robust discussion," was all White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Thursday.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross joined Trump and first lady Melania Trump on the flight to Palm Beach, and were set to join Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for the meeting with their Chinese counterparts. National security adviser H.R. McMaster also traveled with the president.
Xi's delegation could not all be accommodated at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's so-called "winter White House." They will instead stay at the Eau Palm Beach Resort and Spa in nearby Manalapan.
China has long been one of Trump's favorite political punching bags, and was one of his most prominent foils during his presidential campaign. He accused Beijing of "raping" the U.S. economically, vowing to label them as a currency manipulator and take action to address a yawning trade deficit between the two nations.
While the Obama administration clashed with China on issues like cybersecurity and territorial claims in the South China Sea, Obama and Xi forged a key partnership on climate change that laid the groundwork for the historic Paris climate agreement.
Obama also pursued a major trade pact with Pacific powers, including Japan and Vietnam, both to boost U.S. exports to the rapidly growing region but also to cement America's influence in the region as a check to China.
Trump's decision to scrap the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership may actually move countries in the region closer to China, which has sought to enact its own regional trade agreement.
Appearing with Obama for the final time, shortly after Trump's election, Xi said the U.S.-China relationship had come to a "hinge moment," but that he hoped the bilateral relationship would continue to grow.
Weeks later, before his inauguration, Trump spoke by phone with the leader of Taiwan, breaking with the long-standing U.S. recognition of China's "One China" policy, which does not recognize the island as an independent state.
Weeks later, however, Trump and Xi spoke by phone and the White House put out a statement affirming the policy followed by every president since Richard Nixon.
Briefing reporters ahead of Xi's visit, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs Susan Thornton said she believed the flap had been put to rest.
"We certainly hope that they (the Chinese) are going to be more helpful" on North Korea, Thornton said. "We want to see even better cooperation to try to bring about a solution to the North Korea threat, but we'll certainly be talking to them about what more they can do, and we are looking to them to be doing more in the future."
Diplomats have noted that Tillerson, who greeted Xi upon his arrival in Palm Beach on Thursday, seemed to take on traditional Communist China talking points when he was in Beijing last month, speaking of "win-win" outcomes and "mutual respect."
China has long interpreted that language to indicate no interference on issues such as Tibet and human rights, but Thornton said that interpretation was off base.
"I think people have focused a little bit too much on this specific use of this language," she said.
