appConfigEntityId

bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

isVideo

articlePageQuery

article

articleSchemaContent

content

hooksArticlePageAdvertisementConfigArticle

hooksArticlePageFloatingButtonConfigArticle

appConfig

filter

json

liveArticle

Khushboo Razdan

When the presidents of the United States and China meet in Washington, the world will be watching to see whether their two countries can make good on their agreement to work towards “constructive strategic stability”. In the sixth part of a series, Khushboo Razdan looks at how a presidential appeal to America’s heartland is playing out.
Of the countless preparations being made for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s highly anticipated American trip, arguably the first came in the form of a personal letter.
On February 16, seven months before his White House visit, Xi wrote to friends in the midwestern US state of Iowa, sending a Chinese New Year card across the Pacific.
In it, the Chinese leader repeated a line Beijing uses when official relations are strained, saying the hope of the relationship “lies in the people”, its foundation “is grass-roots connections” and its future “depends on the youth”.
Xi wrote to Luca Berrone and the circle that welcomed him in 1985 on his first-ever US visit – Sarah Lande, Gary Dvorchak, Rick Kimberley and Terry Branstad, a former Iowa governor and former US ambassador – as well as students from the youth exchange initiative the Chinese leader announced in 2023.

No matter what direction politics took, Xi told them in the letter, the will of the two peoples “will not change”.
China’s leader appears to have invoked his long-standing personal ties with Iowa to soften the atmosphere ahead of his White House visit, as American farmers remain deeply sceptical amid severe trade war losses battering the heartland.
The personal thread may be intact, but the agricultural partnership that once gave it weight is not. And while those familiar faces still anchor the friendship narrative, they are also in the blast zone.
Grant Kimberley lives in both realities.
In February 2012, during Xi’s second visit to Iowa, his family hosted the then Chinese vice-president at the Maxwell farm. Kimberley, then 36, said ni hao in the yard. He is now senior director of market development at the Iowa Soybean Association.
“The significance of the letter was as much about the relationship as the message itself,” said Kimberley, son of Rick Kimberley, calling it “a reminder that personal relationships built on mutual respect over decades still matter”.




Yet, the letter did not change trade policy or market conditions.
Farmers appreciate goodwill and friendship, Kimberley said, but ultimately look for “stable trade relationships and practical results”.
He said he believed Xi “has a genuine appreciation for Iowa and its people”. And he still saw farm trade as “the ballast of the overall relationship”.
Diplomacy mattered “because communication is always better than misunderstanding”, Kimberley continued, saying the real test was whether “markets remain open, customers remain engaged and trade relationships remain reliable”.
The market that once seemed reliable now switches on for summits.
US agricultural exports to China plummeted from US$24.5 billion in 2024 to US$8.4 billion in 2025, a two-thirds contraction that pushed China from a top-five farm customer to sixth.


Soybeans took the biggest hit, tumbling from US$12.6 billion to about US$3 billion. From late May through late November 2025, official data showed no US soy shipments to China. Beijing instead bought from Brazil.
North Dakota State University later estimated that Chinese retaliation cost US agriculture US$14.9 billion from March 2025 to February 2026. Iowa, California and Illinois each lost about US$1.2 billion.
Soybeans alone accounted for US$6.8 billion – nearly half the total. Even after federal aid, the American Soybean Association put 2025 soybean losses at nearly US$75 an acre.
This is the second major escalation in the US-China trade war since the original conflict began in 2018. The first taught Beijing it could live without Iowa beans. The second taught Iowa something else: China can walk away, while Washington’s relief arrives later and smaller.
America’s new soybean marketing year began on September 1. The US Department of Agriculture said Chinese buyers took 136,000 tonnes that day, followed by flash sales of 202,000 tonnes and 192,000 tonnes in the next two sessions.
After Xi and US President Donald Trump met in South Korea in October last year, China pledged 12 million tonnes in the short term, then 25 million tonnes a year through 2028, alongside about US$17 billion a year in wider US farm purchases.
New crop sales to China resumed as the Washington date neared. The USDA said state buyers were buying against the Busan pledge. Commercial crushers continued to prefer Brazilian beans because of the 10 per cent tariff.
American soy still pays that tariff. Brazilian soy does not. Brazil kept selling through 2025 without waiting for a presidential summit.
Whether the new US cargoes keep coming after Xi leaves Washington is the test Kimberley’s members will watch for.
According to Tao Wang, who teaches the history of US-China relations at Iowa State University, the February letter was more than a new year’s greeting.
Xi sought “to reach not only his old friends but also, through them, a bigger American public”, Wang said.
Iowa is useful because the tie is more than 40 years old and “looks personal, not only diplomatic”.




“There is a farm calculation in that,” added Wang, who said keeping faith with a state that still wants to sell soybeans could “help strengthen the American groups who want stable, cooperative economic ties with China”.
Wang refrained from suggesting that Xi asked anyone to lobby Washington. But he noted the letter’s timing came after a difficult period that included a surprise leaders’ call touching on Taiwan and “alongside signs that China will buy soybeans again”.
A friendly letter, he said, was “a low-cost way to warm the atmosphere” before the White House visit.
One would be hard pressed to call the 2026 and 2012 trips identical.
In 2012, Xi was vice-president and looked the part of a future leader, Wang said. And the Iowa city of Muscatine had a job: to put a face on the rising statesman.
In 2026, Xi was “the supreme leader with a full agenda of high-stakes negotiation”, the professor added.
A stop on the Mississippi River “does not fit this kind of visit any more”, Wang said, adding that Xi’s letter offered a way to keep “that Iowa channel warm” without diverting precious time during the trip to Washington.




Until now, the personal and student channels have proved fruitful.
The “50,000 in 5 Years” programme Xi announced during his 2023 US visit still sends Iowa pupils to China, with the sister-state link through the non-profit Iowa Sister States and Hebei province moving delegations and farm exchanges.
“More than a thousand young Iowans have already gone through this youth exchange initiative,” Wang estimated.
What has fallen by the wayside is “open, unscrutinised institutional cooperation”, especially at universities, he said.
Wang pointed to a letter in March from Iowa state congressman Taylor Collins, the Republican chairman of the Iowa House Higher Education Committee, to Drake University in Des Moines, the state capital, demanding files on its China partnerships.


There was also an Iowa House-passed bill introduced in January that would stop Iowa universities hiring H-1B visa holders from China, he said, noting there were fewer Chinese scholars, researchers and students than a decade ago.
The break with farmers is colder. After Iowa became a target of retaliation, growers “now see Beijing less as a stable partner and more as a transactional, unpredictable customer”, Wang added.
Jonathan Hassid, who teaches China politics at Iowa State, is unsentimental about Xi’s letter.
Hassid described it as a means “to bypass normal diplomacy and speak directly to ordinary citizens”, adding that it had received “little attention in the US or Iowa presses and is probably unfamiliar to most Iowans”.
Nor could the circumstances be said to resemble 1985.
“Candidates for political office regularly attack China” now, Hassid said, recalling that at this year’s Iowa State Fair, a low-flying aircraft towed a banner accusing a politician of having “sold out Iowa to China”.
Beijing hoped that direct appeals might “slowly shift attitudes over time”, he added. “Whether the approach works is an open question.”
Tourism both ways thinned after the coronavirus pandemic, Hassid said, and Chinese language enrolments “declined dramatically”.
“The golden age of US-China people-to-people ties has passed.”
And while Muscatine cherishes its Xi story, “most Iowans are simply unaware”.
As Hassid sees it, “these visits matter more to the Chinese Communist Party than they do to most local Iowans”.
Earlier this month, that disconnect was evident in the political chatter coursing through a riverfront hotel in Minnesota’s capital.

Jeff Winton, a New York dairy farmer, spoke at the Midwestern Legislative Conference in St Paul attended by several hundred state senators, representatives and officials.
The talk in the halls spanned beef imports, the fight with Canada, diesel and fertiliser after the war in Iran, drought, the November midterms and people feeling worn out.
“Not once did China or President Xi come up during any of the conversations I had,” Winton said. “I truly believe that there are many more important things on farmers’ minds right now than China and President Xi.”
At best, the Chinese leader’s visit to Washington was “political theatre” as the midterms approach, he added, “and nothing more than that”.
The symbolism of the visit could be said to be mutually beneficial. Xi can invoke an Iowa relationship that predates the trade war. Trump can point to Chinese purchases returning.
For farmers, neither means much if the market disappears again when the politics turn.
John Bartman, an Illinois farmer, had not seen Xi’s letter until this week. He interpreted it as “another head of state that doesn’t want to deal with Donald Trump”.
Bartman portrayed farmers as “stuck in the middle”, arguing that “food shouldn’t ever be used as a point of leverage”.
China’s relationship with the American heartland changed under Trump, he said, with Beijing willing to “use any type of leverage” to get a better price.
Of Xi’s Washington visit, Bartman said China “still hasn’t even bought half of what they promised”.
As for Trump, the farmer said the US president “needs to have a good showing in rural America” ahead of the midterm elections.
“If China buys one bushel … Donald Trump will make a big deal out of it … when he clearly doesn’t” support farmers.


Will the Trump-Xi wartime ally nostalgia prompt a Japanese rethink on China ties?

Xi-Trump atmospherics welcomed but mask structural rifts: analysts

The porcupine dilemma: why US-China diplomacy is about distance, not deals

What Donald Trump and Xi Jinping revealed in the body language with their wives

2026 Xi-Trump summits

What Xi Jinping’s letter to old friends in Iowa means in an altered America

Illustration: Lau Ka-kuen

Xi Jinping, then China’s vice-president, gives the granddaughter of his friend Sarah Lande a panda doll in Muscatine, Iowa, during a 2012 visit. Xi first visited the US Midwestern state in 1985. Photo: Xinhua

US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to meet in Washington in September, which would mark their second in-person meeting of 2026, following Trump’s trip to Beijing in May. Photo: AP

Chinese President Xi Jinping will pay state visit to US this week, Beijing confirms

Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump arrive for a state dinner in honour of the US leader, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on May 14. Photo: AP

Trump says Xi state dinner is ‘a very tough ticket’ as business guest list takes shape

US President Donald Trump speaks during a healthcare event at the White House in Washington on Friday. Photo: AP

Rare honour: Trump will greet Xi at Joint Base Andrews, not just White House

Chinese President Xi Jinping participates in a welcome ceremony for US President Donald Trump at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on May 14, 2026. Photo: AP

A screenshot from a video posted to the X account of US first lady Melania Trump shows a welcome sheet bearing the name of Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife, Peng Liyuan. Image: @FLOTUS/X

US military prepares ceremonial welcome for Xi Jinping at the White House

Service members from various US military branches are seen dressed in ceremonial uniform and standing in formation on the White House grounds in a video posted to social media on Tuesday. Photo: X/ @Lucas Tomlinson

Dong Jun takes softer line on US at Xiangshan Forum as Xi prepares for Trump summit

China’s Defence Minister Dong Jun attends the Beijing Xiangshan Forum on Wednesday. Photo: X.com/XiangshanForum

News

China

Diplomacy

Xi-Trump path to ‘constructive strategic stability’

Why China is playing it cool amid Trump’s disruption and churn

 Illustration: Brian Wang

US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping talk as they leave after a bilateral meeting in Busan, South Korea on October 30, 2025. Photo: TNS

US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in 2025. The pair will meet again this weekend for preparatory talks before Xi’s summit with Trump in Washington next week. Photo: Keystone via AP

Analysts tip a stronger hand for China ahead of Xi-Trump summit in Washington

Illustration: Lau Ka-kuen
 

Chinese President Xi Jinping (centre) poses for a group photo with fellow leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation member states in Kyrgyzstan on September 1. Photo: Xinhua

Former WTO head Pascal Lamy on the EU’s China choice: get a rebalance, or go protectionist

 Illustration: Henry Wong

The US-China tech war has evolved since the last Xi-Trump summit. Who has the edge now?

Illustration: Henry Wong

Can Xi and Trump use their leverage to actually make progress?

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping will meet face-to-face for the second time this year. Photo: Reuters

Pacing problem: can AI fears overcome US-China race dynamics and force a slowdown?

 Illustration: Lau Ka-kuen

The personal thread may be intact, but the US agricultural partnership that once gave it weight is not


The personal thread may be intact, but the US agricultural partnership that once gave it weight is not.


.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The personal thread may be intact, but the US agricultural partnership that once gave it weight is not

The personal thread may be intact, but the US agricultural partnership that once gave it weight is not