Trump announces Boeing jet order from China. Beijing stays silent.

President Donald Trump said Thursday that China had agreed to order 200 Boeing jets, potentially lifting the fortunes of the American jet manufacturer in one of the world’s largest aviation markets.

In an interview with Fox News, Trump hailed what he termed as successes from the first day of meetings with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. He said Xi told him that an order would be placed for the American planes.

“He’s going to order 200 jets. That’s a big thing,” Trump said in an interview that took place after the morning meetings between the two leaders.

However, as of midday Friday, the Chinese side had not made any announcements regarding whether it has agreed to purchase aircraft from Boeing.

Numerous predictions of a very large Boeing deal have preceded recent summits between the two countries’ leaders, but none have materialised. In September 2024, the aircraft-leasing arm of state-owned China Development Bank did order 50 Boeing 737 MAX 8s, but separately from a summit.

A Boeing official referred a request for comment to the White House. Kelly Ortberg, Boeing’s CEO, is part of the delegation of American business leaders who have traveled to Beijing with Trump.

As Trump was preparing to leave Beijing on Friday, Xi said at a concluding appearance with him that they had “achieved a wide range of cooperative outcomes.” In a statement a little earlier in the day, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry gave a general review of the summit, offering no details on the state of trade negotiations but saying that the interaction between the two leaders “injected much-needed stability and certainty into the world.”

Beijing has strategically pursued industrial self-reliance and worked to reduce its dependencies on the West. But in a handful of sectors, American and European companies still lead. One is commercial aviation, with Boeing and Europe’s Airbus competing for China’s enormous market.

One in seven planes in use today flies in China, according to a 2025 estimate by Cirium, an aviation data firm. Boeing projects that China’s jet fleet will double over the next 20 years to almost 10,000 planes.

Deliveries of Boeing planes to Chinese customers slowed significantly after two fatal crashes involving Boeing 737 MAX jets in 2018 and 2019. In Trump’s first term, the two countries struck an agreement in January 2020 that called for a sharp increase in Chinese purchases of American-manufactured goods, a target that could only be met through major purchases of Boeing jets.

Weeks later, China declared it could not comply with the agreement because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and, in April 2020, it canceled the purchase of 29 undelivered 737 MAX jets.

Although the 2020 agreement called for purchases from the United States to continue rising through 2025, China did not return to it, and discussions of aircraft purchases have proceeded slowly ever since.

Deliveries to China resumed in earnest in 2024, but stalled again last year when Chinese airlines, apparently on government instructions, warned of further delays in response to Trump’s tariffs. Shipments eventually restarted as trade tensions eased.

Boeing’s troubles in China have been a boon for Airbus, its European rival. Chinese customers have outstanding orders for nearly 500 Airbus jets, compared with fewer than 200 from Boeing, said Cirium.

Unlike Boeing, Airbus yielded to Chinese pressure and has assembled its A320 single-aisle jet in Tianjin since 2008. The move has helped it gain market share but at the cost of helping China to begin developing the expertise to build its own jetliners. The Chinese government has bankrolled Comac, a Shanghai-based, state-owned company that makes a jet, the C919, that is described by aviation analysts as almost identical to the A320.

However, the C919 still uses many components from foreign companies, notably the engines and avionics.