US-China ties need more working-level dialogues, not just summits: business chamber

The president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China (AmCham China) has urged Beijing and Washington to push more negotiations down to working-level officials, saying businesses need greater long-term stability in bilateral ties than leader-level diplomacy alone can provide.

Michael Hart, president of the chamber, said American businesses were encouraged by the unprecedented frequency of meetings between the presidents of China and the US, but warned that working-level officials had less time to prepare for the talks and develop substantive outcomes.

“We’re feeling confident because there are two more meetings to come,” Hart said at the Bund Summit in Shanghai on Wednesday.

“[But] the bad part is that normally it’s the working-level bureaucrats who actually deal with clear facts, and when the two leaders are making decisions, you don’t have enough of them.”

He said a US official had told him that government agencies would normally have more than six months to prepare for a leaders’ meeting, but had less than six months between the meetings held in May and September.

Hart said he hoped that in 2027 negotiations would first be delegated to senior economic officials from both sides, and then “actually further down to the working-level folks”.

The past year has seen dramatic swings in China-US relations, from an escalating trade war to a tentative easing of tensions. A meeting between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump in Busan in October 2025 helped cool trade tensions, followed by Trump’s visit to Beijing in May 2026 and Xi’s visit to Washington in September.

The two leaders are expected to meet again at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ summit in Shenzhen next month and at the G20 summit in Miami in December.

Hart said that while the “unprecedented” frequency of leader-level meetings was “good”, American businesses still felt that bilateral ties could “go up or down” depending on decisions made by the two leaders.

“US businesses or businesses in general … need much longer-term stability,” he said.

“We cannot become addicted to relying on these two leaders to meet, whether it be due to structural or personal [reasons]. Fundamental problems still exist. Market access issues still exist, so there are plenty of issues to work on.”