Chinese business leaders who traveled to the United States last week alongside dictator Xi Jinping are complaining that the were not invited to President Donald Trump’s state dinner with Xi on September 24.
The state dinner was attended by what the Associated Press (AP) described as “a cavalcade of billionaires, Washington powerbrokers, and business leaders,” but not many Chinese CEOs were counted among that cavalcade.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that “of 134 guests at the state dinner, only 19 were part of the Chinese delegation.” This left most of the high-powered businesspersons in Xi’s entourage grumbling on the sidelines.
The SCMP quoted “multiple sources” who said invitations for these Chinese tycoons were “under consideration until the summit’s final hours,” but they were never finalized due to “poor communication between the two governments, the two sides’ differing views on reciprocity, and the White House’s unclear attitude towards Chinese investments in the United States.”
According to these unnamed sources, the U.S. side originally floated the idea of inviting top Chinese CEOs to the state dinner in the spirit of “reciprocity,” because when President Donald Trump visited Beijing in May, the likes of Elon Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook were feted at a banquet alongside him.
Something apparently went wrong during the planning states of Xi’s visit to Washington, because the White House was ostensibly slow to answer questions from the Chinese government about state dinner invitations.
This could have been due to the generally slow progress made on U.S.-China trade deals since May. By the time of Xi’s visit to Washington last week, the Chinese side wasn’t even mentioning the much-ballyhooed “Board of Investment” Xi and Trump agreed to in May.
The SCMP noted that Trump has also been getting pushback from some American business leaders who are not enthusiastic about China making investments in the U.S. or flooding the market with cheap exports, notably including leaders of the auto industry.
As late as three days before the state dinner, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Jamieson Greer were trying to hammer out the details for invitations to the state dinner, and a group of Chinese electric vehicle (EV) executives had traveled on their own to Washington to be ready for an invite, but the arrangements never came together.
Some of the SCMP’s sources hinted that the roadblocks were not all on the American side. The Chinese delegation was apparently unhappy that little of substance was settled during Xi’s visit beyond some mutual tariff reductions, and some Chinese officials felt that flooding the state dinner with business leaders would send an incorrect message about the overall success of their excursion to Washington.
Center for a New American Security senior fellow Emily Kilcrease told the left-wing New York Times (NYT) that the state dinner was “a rather depressing marker of how bad the relationship has gotten.”
“One of the highlights of this summit was supposed to be some level of announcement of commercial deals, but it seems like we can’t even get to agreement on some of that,” she said.
The NYT said it would be “difficult to imagine” CEOs such as DeepSeek co-founder Liang Wenfeng and Sam Altman of OpenAI sitting together at a state dinner without mentioning that one reason that pairing would be awkward is that U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) firms have accused Chinese competitors of stealing their creations.
Likewise, American auto executives are worried about a tsunami of cheap Chinese EVs wiping out the billions of dollars they have sunk into developing electric cars, and a few of China’s biggest firms, such as online giant Alibaba, telecom firm Huawei, and carmaker BYD, are under U.S. sanctions.