Beijing tells Washington the September summit dies if new arms go to Taiwan

China has told the United States it will cancel a planned leaders' meeting later this month if Washington approves any new arms sales to Taiwan before the date, multiple people familiar with the exchanges told Kyodo News on Saturday. Xi Jinping is due to see Donald Trump around 24 September, in what would be their third meeting within a year. Trump wants the photograph before the November midterms. Beijing has now named the price.

Taiwan, the sources said, was restated as a "red line." When the two men met in Beijing in mid-May, Xi called the island the "most important issue" in the relationship and warned that mishandling it could push the two countries into conflict. Trump later told reporters that arms sales to Taiwan could be a "very good bargaining chip" in talks with China. That sentence is the one Chinese officials have been repeating back to their American counterparts.

Under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, the United States is required to provide Taiwan with the means to maintain a sufficient self-defence. In December 2025 the Trump administration announced a package worth about $11 billion, the largest single sale on the books. China protested. Some later accounts have spoken of a further package near $14 billion still in the pipeline. Kyodo's sources did not publish a dollar figure for the sale that would trigger a cancellation. They said any new approval before the summit would be enough.

Neither government has confirmed the threat in its own name. That is normal for this kind of message. It is delivered in private so that each side can deny it if the other blinks. The public fact is the Kyodo report and the calendar. If Xi does not come, the reason will be read through that report whether or not a spokesman repeats it.

Trump has treated the summit as a deliverable. He has also treated Taiwanese arms as leverage. Those two instincts now collide. Selling the weapons keeps faith with a statute and with Taipei. Holding them back keeps the meeting. Beijing has designed the choice so that Washington has to pick in daylight.

A cancelled summit would not, by itself, change the military balance in the Taiwan Strait. It would freeze whatever tariff, investment and technology talks were meant to sit on the same agenda. It would also tell every allied capital watching the midterm calendar that a leaders' meeting with Xi can be pulled if a notification to Congress on Taiwan goes out first. That is a useful lesson for Beijing even if the meeting eventually happens.

The next few days are a test of which file Trump values more: the image of Xi at the White House, or the next shipment of systems that Taipei says it needs before the next crisis. China has said those two files cannot move on the same week.