President Trump departs this week for a Wednesday-to-Friday state visit to Beijing, where he and Chinese President Xi Jinping will sit down Thursday for a summit whose agenda has swelled well beyond the Iran war that forced its delay from March. Trade, technology, rare-earth export controls, Taiwan and artificial intelligence are all on the table, alongside fentanyl cooperation that both governments previewed Monday with the joint arrest of five drug-trafficking suspects.

The meeting is the first face-to-face between the two leaders since their October session in South Korea, and the broadest U.S.-China negotiation since Trump returned to office. Its outcome will set the price of rare earths used in cars and chips, the U.S. posture on Taiwan, and whether the world's two largest economies move toward a wider truce or a deeper standoff. "Virtually everyone has a stake in the outcome of this meeting," said Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

A goodwill opener

Beijing said Monday that U.S. and Chinese authorities had jointly arrested five suspects — three Americans and two Chinese nationals — in a cross-border smuggling operation spanning Florida, Nevada and the Chinese provinces of Liaoning and Guangdong. The Drug Enforcement Administration and the narcotics control bureau of China's Ministry of Public Security carried out the arrests in early April, state broadcaster CCTV said, and seized a quantity of protonitazene and bromazolam.

The announcement was timed to the summit. Reducing the flow of drugs into the United States, including fentanyl, is expected to sit high on Thursday's agenda. After the October meeting with Xi, Trump cut his fentanyl-related tariffs on Chinese goods to 10 percent from 20 percent. "Currently, the biggest obstacle is the 10% fentanyl tariff," Yu Haibin, deputy director-general of China's Narcotics Control Bureau, told NBC News earlier this year, urging Washington to lift the remaining levy.

What is on the table

In the weeks before the summit, both sides have escalated. Washington has accused Beijing of running industrial-scale campaigns to steal American AI technology. China suspended exports of a wide swath of rare earths and related magnets, banned semiconductors from Nexperia China, ordered Chinese companies not to comply with U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil and hosted Iran's foreign minister in Beijing. The rare-earth move alone has upended supply chains central to global automakers in Europe, Japan and South Korea.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent left for Asia on Monday. He is scheduled to meet Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in Tokyo on Tuesday and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Seoul on Wednesday, ahead of the Beijing sit-down. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said Monday that Xi and Trump would hold in-depth discussions on "major issues concerning China–U.S. relations as well as world peace and development."

Taiwan is the hardest item. In an April 30 call with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Chinese top diplomat Wang Yi described Taiwan as "the biggest point of risk" in the bilateral relationship and urged Washington to make the right choices. Beijing has pressed the administration to scale back its security commitments to Taipei and revise official U.S. policy toward the island.

The skeptics

That is where the alarm bells are loudest. Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told CNBC that any rhetorical softening from Trump on Taiwan, even ambiguous, would be "the most destabilizing outcome" of the summit. She warned against "A tacit or explicit bargain in which Washington appears to concede a sphere of influence to Beijing over Taiwan" in exchange for concessions elsewhere, arguing it would embolden China to erode the island's autonomy. Last month, Xi hosted Cheng Li-wun, chairwoman of Taiwan's opposition Kuomintang, in Beijing and told her China would never tolerate independence — a meeting Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te publicly rebuked.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to visit Beijing next week, days after Trump's departure, a sequencing that will be parsed for any sign that Xi has agreed to dial back support for the Russian war effort in Ukraine.

Trump has signaled he intends to host Xi in Washington later this year, which would mark the Chinese leader's first U.S. visit in a decade.