Donald Trump gave Xi Jinping a lavish White House welcome on Thursday with all the pageantry the Chinese dictator could have dreamed of. 

Military bands, salutes, flyovers and a personal tour by the president through his gold-decked hallways.

Trump beamed as Xi announced two giant pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, would arrive at Zoo Atlanta within days, continuing a tradition that began when Beijing sent a pair to Washington after Richard Nixon's 1972 visit. 

But the pomp could not paper over the rivalry between the world's two largest economies and military superpowers, which have made artificial intelligence the new front line.  

'Whoever wins AI, you have to remember this. And now I say, whoever wins SI, whoever wins superintelligence, wins,' Trump told the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, two days before Xi's arrival.

'And we're leading now over China by a lot and everyone else,' he added.

But Xi pushed back on that framing in his opening remarks at the White House on Thursday, before sitting down for talks with Trump. 

'We do not need to avoid mentioning competition, but our competition should be a healthy one and should be kept within bounds. It should be a race of catching up with one another, not a wrestle in which either wins or loses,' Xi said.

The communist tyrant said the US and China should avoid 'the Thucydides Trap,' the theory that a rising power and an established one are likely to go to war.

Xi has invoked the term before, which refers to the Peloponnesian War between a rising Athens, cast here as China, and a fearful Sparta, cast as America.

Xi said that as the world's leading AI powers, both countries had the 'capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good.' 

'We should coexist in peace. As I have said many times, China and the United States, as two major countries, stand to gain from cooperation and will both lose in confrontation,' Xi said.

He invoked Chinese and American troops fighting side by side against fascism in World War II. 

'Chinese people have never forgotten that part of history, nor have the American people,' Xi said.

'Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can go hand in hand,' he added.

'Let us meet the people's expectation and show our historical initiative. Let us keep advancing the cause of friendship between our two peoples and work together to build a better world.'

Beijing, the biggest buyer of Iranian oil, has resisted months of pressure from Washington to lean on Tehran to end the almost seven-month war. 

Xi wants Washington to halt arms sales to Taiwan, the self-governing democratic island off China's southeast coast which Beijing claims as its own. 

The AI race has made Taiwan an even bigger prize: the island makes around 90 percent of the world's most advanced chips. 

The one-year trade truce due to lapse on November 10 will be pushed back to January 10, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Wednesday, although Beijing did not immediately confirm it. 

Trump will host Xi at a black-tie state dinner in the East Room on Thursday night, having complained that his new White House ballroom would not be finished in time.

Melania, who led the preparations, said the room's decor 'draws on the color red's longstanding cultural significance throughout Chinese history.'

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg are on the guest list, all of them pouring billions into AI. 

The red-carpet treatment has drawn fire from Trump ally Roger Wicker, the Mississippi Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee.

'Quite frankly, had the White House asked me for advice, I would have suggested the president not invite Xi Jinping to Washington for such a lavish welcome here in the United States of America based on all of the troubling issues we have with President Xi and the Chinese Communist Party,' Wicker said in a Senate floor speech Tuesday.  

The pair could meet up to four times this year, Bessent said, with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen in November and the G20 at Trump's own Doral golf resort near Miami in December still to come.