Watch this at Trump-Xi summit

Hi, this is Evelyn, writing to you from Beijing. Welcome to the latest edition of The China Connection — a snapshot of what I’m seeing and hearing from local businesses.

I’m joined again by my Singapore-based colleague Anniek Bao, as we unpack expectations inside and outside China for a closely watched summit in Washington, D.C., later this week. Fanfare aside, what will this meeting achieve?

As Chinese President Xi Jinping heads to the U.S. for his first state visit since the Obama administration, here’s what businesses are watching:

At a meeting last fall in South Korea, U.S. President Donald Trump and Xi agreed to suspend rare earth export controls and retaliatory tariff measures for a year.

Then when the two leaders met in May, Beijing agreed to ramp up purchases of U.S. agricultural products and Boeing jets, while both sides planned new trade and investment-related cooperation mechanisms.

The two sides also decided to jointly pursue “constructive strategic stability.”

That May summit started “a U-turn in China-U.S. relations,” said Zhou Bo, a retired senior colonel, China Forum expert and a senior fellow at Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy.

It was a rare recognition of Beijing as a peer power, he said. “Stability can only be found between countries of similar strength.”

So far, China has increased purchases of American soybeans in recent weeks, completing nearly half of the committed annual sum of 25 million tons this year, according to Reuters.

But Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg last week, in an event with Morgan Stanley, downplayed expectations that Beijing would follow through on the 200-jetliner order commitment in a single blockbuster deal, expecting incremental orders by individual carriers instead.

“The best the U.S. can hope for is probably just maintaining the status quo,” Chad Brown, senior fellow at the U.S.-based Peterson Institute for International Economics, told reporters on Monday. “That’s really because of the leverage China holds at the moment over rare earths, permanent magnets.”

“Until that problem is solved, China is really going to continue to have that kind of leverage and push back on any major demands that a U.S. administration…