A White House spokeswoman confirmed that on Nov. 19, Trump is slated to sit down with China's Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin while the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit takes place in Shenzhen. Xi is hosting this year's APEC, scheduled for Nov. 18-19.
The Asia trip follows a domestic political blow in the Nov. 3 midterms, when Democrats captured both the House and the Senate. Before heading to China, Trump will stop in Manila to meet the Quad leaders (India, Japan and Australia, plus the US), conclude a trade agreement with Thailand, and take part in the ASEAN summit that the Philippines is hosting.
Trump has said the three-way session would center on denuclearization, a difficult task because Beijing is unwilling to explore caps on nuclear stockpiles with Washington and Moscow, which hold much larger arsenals.
A senior administration official said Trump plans to address the war in Iran with Xi and Putin and is unlikely to bring up Ukraine during the trilateral. The meeting also comes while Trump looks for ways to bring the war in Ukraine to a close, a conflict that has lasted upward of four years following Russia's full-scale invasion in early 2022. The official added that a standalone bilateral between Trump and Putin is not anticipated, while a second official said Trump does not intend to meet North Korea's Kim Jong Un, despite expressing interest earlier this year.
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After Manila, Trump will head to Shenzhen to sit down with both Putin and Xi and to conduct his third of four scheduled one-on-one sessions with the Chinese leader this year. The White House is also dealing with the fallout from new disclosures involving former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's extramarital relationship with Alice Huang, the CEO of Megapseed, whom US intelligence suspects is a Chinese spy. Senior officials minimized the Nvidia matter, saying it would not affect the trip and that Trump does not intend to bring it up with Xi.
Trump and Xi last met in September at a Washington state dinner that aimed to steady ties rather than deliver breakthroughs. The most notable outcome was an extension of a trade truce until January 2027, a decision made even before the visit officially began. The two leaders still face hard issues: Difficult topics remain for the two leaders, including tariffs, competition to advance artificial intelligence, Taiwan, and the US war on Iran.
In 2025, China ranked as Iran's second-largest trading partner and was a major buyer of Iranian oil, but a US naval blockade that choked off Iranian crude has pushed Chinese refiners to seek alternative supplies. Trump has repeatedly suggested that China might sell arms to Iran, and has said he would be disappointed if that occurred, while also noting that Xi assured him China would not. In December, Trump and Xi are expected to meet again on the sidelines of the Group of 20 gathering in Doral, Florida.
Trade, chips and energy all sit in the blast radius of these meetings. Markets will parse any signal on tariffs, export controls on semiconductors, and oil flows out of Shenzhen, then look to Doral for follow through.
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