Xi Jinping is reusing a diplomatic sign that was valid a decade ago: entrepreneurs.
Reuters on September 4.Xi Jinping is scheduled to visit the United States on September 24 and hold a summit with U.S. President Trump to lead a larger delegation of Chinese entrepreneurs to Washington, D.C. This arrangement is not unusual for Xi Jinping.After Beijing’s massive regulatory reforms in the Internet, education, real estate and other industries since 2020, China’s top leaders have rarely highlighted the collective role of large private corporate executives in overseas visits.
Beijing clearly hopes to release a message to Washington through these companies: China is still willing to talk about trade, investment and commercial cooperation.
But the international environment in 2026 is very different from that of Xi Jinping’s last massive visit to the United States in 2015, when he led Chinese entrepreneurs.
At the time, the U.S. and European policymakers still believed that expanding trade, investment and market access could further integrate China into the international economic system.Today, more and more governments are discussing not how to integrate China deeper into globalization, but how to reduce dependence on China’s key supply chains, strategic resources, technology and infrastructure.
Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States is therefore not a simple replica of 2015.
It is more like Beijing trying to use successful business diplomacy tools in the past to deal with an international environment that has already undergone structural changes.
G20 "19 to 1", Beijing faces not only the United States
The most direct signals come from the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors’ meeting that just ended.
The U.S. pushed the G20 to take action against the “non-market policy” that caused trade imbalances, with 19 other members outside of China expressing support for the direction.China opposed the statement, and the meeting did not eventually form a traditional joint communiqué recognized by all members.
The controversial point is that the United States is not again criticizing China’s economic policy.
The United States has long accused the Chinese government of supporting manufacturing through subsidies, industrial policies and other national resources, and Beijing has long rejected the U.S. policy to politicize economic issues.
What really changes is that concerns have spread beyond the United States.
Economies such as Europe, Japan and India do not agree with Washington on all trade and foreign affairs, but they are increasingly in need of industrial competition from China’s rapid expansion of manufacturing capabilities.
This means that Beijing’s most widely used explanation in the past – “The United States holds back China in order to maintain hegemony” – is becoming increasingly difficult to cover the full reality.
When different countries worry that their own automobiles, steel, machinery, clean energy, chemicals, or other industries will be impacted by China’s low-cost exports, they first protect their own economic interests, rather than accept the entire U.S. strategy toward China.
This is more difficult for Xi than the simple Chinese-American competition.
Because what Beijing may face is no longer a unified front led by Washington, but precautionary measures established by several countries on the basis of their own interests.
Entrepreneurs are needed again, but they are not independent forces outside the power of the Party State.
This is why Xi Jinping has pushed entrepreneurs back to the forefront of diplomacy.
What these entrepreneurs represent is key to understanding this visit.
There are private property rights, private shareholders and private companies in China, and it is not accurate to simply describe all Chinese private enterprises as state-owned enterprises.
But China’s large private enterprises cannot be understood as a Western-style business group that is completely independent of political power.
Article 18: Companies shall establish Party organizations and carry out Party activities in accordance with the Constitution of the Communist Party of China, and shall provide necessary conditions for the activities of Party organizations.For state-funded companies, the law further clarifies that the Chinese Communist Party shall "play a leadership role" and study and discuss major business management matters.
This institutional arrangement means that the property nature of Chinese enterprises and the political environment are two different levels of problems.
An enterprise can be a private holding, but it still operates in a system in which a CPC organization can lawfully enter enter enterprises, the government has extensive supervisory powers, and finance and data are bound by the national security system.
The experience of the last few years has clearly shown how fast political power can change the fate of a private company.
From Internet platforms, financial science and technology to education training, Beijing's regulatory actions have changed the business model of the entire industry in a very short time.In 2025, Xi Jinping again summoned the heads of technology enterprises such as Alibaba, Tencent, Biady, Huawei, Xiaomi and DeepSeek to participate in high-profile meetings, Reuters then summarized this change for Xi Jinping to reorganize a force that serves science and technology autonomy and national strategy.
This does not mean that these companies do not have their own commercial interests.
It means that when enterprises are bigger to involve AI, data, finance, communications, chips, new energy vehicles and global supply chains, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to completely separate themselves from national strategies.
If Xi Jinping took a delegation of large entrepreneurs to the United States, this group of businessmen would not only represent the company's orders and profits, but also inevitably bear the shadow of Beijing's national industrial policy and foreign strategy.
In other words, what Xi Jinping really brought to Washington was not just entrepreneurs.
At the same time, he was demonstrating the Chinese regime’s ability to organize politics over China’s large capital.
Beijing wants to open up the United States with commercial interests, but Washington is looking at Chinese in a different direction.
The problem is that the way the U.S. sees Chinese has also changed.
China and the United States are currently discussing a series of economic achievements that could be achieved before the summit, including some of the so-called “non-sensitive commodities” trade, tariffs, and rare-earth export licenses.
This arrangement shows that Beijing still wants to use concrete economic interests to reduce the degree of confrontation between China and the United States.
For the Trump administration, procurement, investment, export and employment can also be political outcomes.
Therefore, the trade between China and the United States has not stopped.
The real question is whether commercial transactions can still play the role of stabilizing the entire bilateral relationship as they did a decade ago.
The United States is now increasingly inclined to incorporate Chinese technology, communications, artificial intelligence, key minerals and supply chain issues into the national security framework.
This puts large Chinese enterprises in a credibility situation that Beijing itself cannot easily solve.
The more the Party emphasizes its leadership in the economy and enterprises, the harder it is for the U.S. government to treat large Chinese companies merely as private business entities; the more China uses supply chains and key resources as a national strategic tool, the more other countries have reason to review Chinese enterprises from a national security perspective.
*Rare land became the most typical contradiction before Xi Jinping's visit to the United States
Rare-earth problems especially illustrate this difficulty.
Reuters on September 4 that some Chinese rare-earth suppliers recently refused to ship to U.S. customers because of fears of being punished by Chinese authorities in the current geopolitical environment.
China has an important position in the global supply chain for key minerals.
This advantage could provide Beijing with a negotiating code.
But whenever Beijing turns key supply chains into political instruments, other countries get more reason to look for alternative supplies.
Earlier this year, the G7 and other major economies discussed ways to reduce dependence on rare earth in China.
This forms a typical strategic paradox:
The more China uses its supply chain advantage, the greater the political leverage it can gain in the short term; but the more it uses, the stronger the momentum for other countries to long-term get out of China’s supply chain.
Xi can control today’s export licenses, but can’t control U.S., Japan, Europe and other economies’ mining investment, processing capacity and supply chain restructuring over the next decade.
Changes in the Pacific islands indicate that Beijing’s reaction is going beyond trade.
The negative trends for Beijing are not limited to the economy.
The Pacific Island Forum leaders’ meeting this week expressed concern over China’s recent missile tests in the Pacific Ocean, and despite Nauru’s objection to the position, the meeting showed that China’s military activities have officially entered the security agenda of the region’s island countries.
The Taiwan issue also became a new source of friction during the conference.
Taiwan on September 4 criticized Beijing's adoption of "war-wolf" diplomacy during the forum; previously, China opposed Taiwan's participation in related activities, while Palau, who is a Taiwan affairs country, still invited Taiwan to participate in some activities.
These events are not directly related to the US-China trade talks.
But they point to the same strategic consequences:
Every time Beijing expands its economic, military or political influence, it prompts the affected countries to re-evaluate their distance from China.
Pacific island nations may be more alert about missiles and sovereignty issues; Europe may be tightening trade policies because of industrial competition; the United States may be tightening investment restrictions because of technology security; and Japan may be looking for key mineral alternatives because of supply chain risks.
They do not need to form a unified ideological alliance.
As long as each of them establishes a systemic line of defense against Beijing’s risks, the results will overlap.
The so-called "global extermination", which is truly worth observing, is the institutional "risk management"
Therefore, to simply summarize the current international changes as “the world has formed an extinction coalition” is not consistent with reality.
The world has not formed a unified political alliance with the common goal of overthrowing the regime, and many countries still maintain huge trade, diplomatic cooperation and investment relations with China.
But another trend is becoming increasingly clear, and possibly even deeper than the political slogans.
More and more countries are shifting from the past "contact with China" to the establishment of a "risk de-risk" mechanism on the Party system.
They have begun to re-differentiate between ordinary trade and industries involving national security, re-examine the conditions for Chinese capital to enter critical infrastructures, restrict advanced technology transfer, build alternative supply chains, and re-examine how far the distance between Chinese enterprises and the power of the Communist Party of China remains.
The core of this change is not that “all countries are against China.”
Instead, trust in the political system of the Communist Party of China is becoming a cost variable in international economic relations.
This is precisely the most difficult problem to solve with Xi Jinping's entrepreneurial visit to the United States.
Beijing could take dozens of entrepreneurs, prepare billions of dollars in orders, and deal with the Trump administration on some tariffs and commodity trade.
But if more and more countries have begun to see “whether Chinese enterprises can truly be independent of the Chinese Communist Party’s power” as a national security issue, then merely increasing business interests will not restore the political trust of the past.
Xi Jinping wants to replicate 2015, but the world in 2026 really needs to answer
More than a decade ago, when Chinese entrepreneurs accompanied Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States, business expansion itself was a symbol of China’s rise.
Ten years later, the same picture may have a completely different meaning.
President Xi Jinping today needs entrepreneurs to help prove that China is still able to bring markets, orders and investments; rare earth as a negotiating code; trade agreements to ease external economic pressure; and China’s political control over strategic industries, capital and science and technology.
There is no natural compatibility between these objectives.
The deeper the CCP control over enterprises, the more susceptible to question the international credibility of enterprises as subjects of independent markets; the more frequently Beijing uses trade, resources and industrial chains as diplomatic tools, the stronger the momentum for other countries to establish alternative systems; the more China tries to expand its regional influence through military and political pressure, the more likely it is to strengthen its security ties with the United States and its allies.
This is probably the most valuable background before Xi’s visit to the United States in September.
What is really happening is not that the world suddenly decided to break up with China on the same day.
Instead, the globalized system that in the past helped the Communist Party obtain huge economic and strategic gains is gradually increasing the security valve against the power of the party country.
Xi continues to try to reopen the doors of Washington with business, orders and markets.
But he is no longer facing the United States of 2015 or the world of 2015.
The question that Beijing really needs to solve has gone from “how to let foreign countries continue to do business with China” to “how to make a world that is increasingly alert to the CCP system re-believe that China’s commercial power will not eventually become an extension of the political force.”
And this problem, with a visit to the United States and a delegation of entrepreneurs, is far from resolved.
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