Xi Comes to Washington Thursday. The Journal’s Opinion Pages Say Watch the Words, Not the Dinner

Xi Jinping lands in Washington this week, and the choreography is set: a gala state dinner Thursday, and President Trump, breaking his usual pattern, planning to greet him at the airport. That’s the stagecraft. The Journal’s opinion pages spent Monday arguing about what happens between the courses.

The paper’s own editorial asks the president to use the pomp for one man. Jimmy Lai, the 78-year-old Hong Kong newspaper publisher, has spent six years in prison and is in solitary confinement and ill health, the editorial says. Trump raised his case with Xi in Beijing in May; what China released instead was the Christian pastor Ezra Jin, which the editorial reads as Beijing’s way of not releasing Lai. Lai was convicted under the national-security law China imposed on Hong Kong; one of his offenses was writing an op-ed for the Journal itself.

Sliced quietly

Across the page, Jason Hsu — a Hudson Institute senior fellow who sat in Taiwan’s parliament from 2016 to 2020 — argues that a calm summit is the thing to worry about. Trump said after the May meeting that Taiwan’s situation should stay as it is; Hsu says it hasn’t. Near-daily Chinese sorties, he writes, have effectively erased the strait’s median line, incursions into Taiwan’s air-defense zone are routine, and coast-guard patrols, suspected undersea-cable sabotage and redrawn civil-aviation routes each stay just under the threshold for a response. He cites the July 2025 decision to block Taiwan President Lai Ching-te’s New York stopover to protect trade talks, and Trump’s description of a $14 billion arms package as a negotiating chip. A status quo that keeps eroding, in Hsu’s phrase, is “defeat on the installment plan.”

Hsu expects Xi to arrive not with demands but with offers Trump can announce that afternoon — soybeans, Boeing (BA) orders, rare-earth assurances — and lists what to listen for in return: Washington shifting from doesn’t support to opposes Taiwan independence; a drift from the U.S. one-China policy toward Beijing’s one-China principle; any hint arms sales now need consultation with Xi; and whether the arms package moves through Congress untied from trade. All of that is Hsu’s argument, not the news pages’ reporting.

Our read

We’re nonpartisan about the politics and specific about the money. A summit like this can move particular sectors in a day — soybean prices, Boeing, the rare-earth names — but don’t position for the headline. Offers announced in the afternoon can be walked back the next week; trading the summit is guessing at a script two people haven’t finished writing. The quieter issue for most portfolios is concentration. Taiwan is a risk many chip-heavy accounts carry without knowing it: by most industry accounts, one island makes most of the world’s most advanced chips, and Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) sits in the supply chain of Nvidia (NVDA) and nearly everyone else. On a day like Monday — Nasdaq at a record, chip stocks up sharply — that check feels unnecessary, which is when it’s cheapest.

Our answer is sizing, not forecasting. The North Star books hold TSM at 2%, sized so that a summit that goes badly is a bad day, not a changed plan — and that’s the test to run on your own holdings before Thursday. Add up everything that depends on Taiwan staying quiet: the chipmaker, the AI names that buy from it, the index fund that’s heavy in technology. If a bad headline would change your retirement date, the position is too big, whatever happens at dinner.