The first meaningful discussions between arguably the two most powerful people on the planet are, of course, hugely significant. Trump spent a large chunk of his election campaign attacking China's supposedly unfair trade and fiscal practices, which he promised would be challenged by a more protectionist and nationalist Trump presidency. Xi, meanwhile, is meeting the erratic U.S. president at a time when his own political future at home is not as secure as some might think.

Trump has already signaled this may be a tough encounter. But, as my colleague Simon Denyer wrote last week, it's quite likely Xi has come bearing gifts — “a package of pledges designed to give the U.S. president some 'tweetable' promises to present as victories.” Whether this translates into long-term wins for either leader is less clear. Either way, here are the main storylines to watch:

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The question of trade

“We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” declared Trump on the campaign trail last year. He was talking about the United States' considerable trade deficit with China and Beijing's history of currency manipulation. Part of Trump's pledge to revive blue-collar American jobs explicitly involved punishing China on the world stage.

This was a major departure from previous U.S. administrations, both Republican and Democratic, which embraced the dogma of open markets and sought to make China a reliable partner within — not an opponent to — an American-led international order. Earlier this year, as the world readied for Trump's inauguration, Xi cast himself as a custodian of that order, defending globalization, open borders and free trade — all things Trump campaigned against — at the World Economic Forum. Xi's rhetoric received mixed reviews, but it underscored the strange new paradigm shaping global relations.

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Ahead of Xi's visit this week, China's state media attempted to make the case for normal bilateral ties. “U.S. job losses are not China's fault,” read a Xinhua commentary on Wednesday. The next day, another piece argued that China's trade surplus “does not necessarily mean China benefits while the United States loses.” Xinhua went on: “About 40 percent of the trade surplus is actually generated by U.S. companies in China.”

Ironically, as economic experts note, Trump's protectionist agenda is more in line with China's own practices, including its boosting of mammoth Chinese state-run companies.

“Mr. Trump seems to want to move the U.S. toward China’s approach, rather than move China toward the U.S. approach of open trade and globalization,” said Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade at Cornell University, to my colleague Ana Swanson. “He seems to want the U.S. to be more like China than China to be more like the U.S. And I’m not sure that’s the best path for the U.S. to go down.”

The question of security

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There will be a Kim Jong Un-shaped elephant in the room in Mar-a-Lago. Amid a flurry of North Korean missile tests, the Trump administration is keen on getting China — Pyongyang's only real friend — to bring the pariah state to heel. Trump and other senior administration officials have signaled their impatience with North Korea and threatened unilateral action in the past week.

“The clock is very, very quickly running out,” a senior White House official told reporters. "All options are on the table for us."

This may all be bluster intended to pressure Beijing, which has cast itself as the honest broker between the North Koreans and the United States — much to American chagrin. Washington's longstanding frustration with what it perceives as China's unwillingness (or inability) to rein in North Korea will also run up against other geopolitical disagreements, including differences over China's expansionist role in the South China Sea and the status of Taiwan.

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On all these fronts, it's likely the Xi-Trump meeting will yield polite sound bites — and few real changes to the tense status quo.

The question of strategy

In the short term, Trump may emerge from Mar-a-Lago having burnished his credentials as a budding statesman — a pleasant photo-op here, a nice headline there. Xi, who will return home as the Communist Party is preparing for a cabinet reshuffle, has to walk a difficult line and “lose face” in the eyes of the global media and the Chinese public.

But in the long term, Western observers see an alarming drift in the course of U.S.-China relations.

“The problem lies in Mr. Trump’s transactional view of the world. He prefers deals to something as necessarily ill-defined as global leadership,” wrote Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens. “Hence the decision to repudiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that would have checked Beijing’s advancing economic influence in the western Pacific and handed Washington important strategic leverage.”

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“As recently as four years ago, Xi and other Chinese leaders fretted, publicly and explicitly, that their people were being seduced by the moral glamour of American democracy — by the openhearted confidence of the 'shining city on a hill' and by the ability of a nation founded on slavery to elect its first African-American President,” wrote the New Yorker's Evan Osnos. “Xi worried that the American example of competence, generosity, and contempt for authoritarianism would, someday, drive his own people to challenge the rule of the Communist Party. Xi has less reason to worry about that today.”