Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ties to Iowa, explained

Chinese President Xi Jinping has an unexpected, decadeslong tie to rural Iowa, maintaining a friendship from across the Pacific with an 87-year-old Iowan woman from the city of Muscatine.Xi is headed to Washington on Thursday for a much-anticipated state visit with President Donald Trump as the United States grapples with how to approach frontier artificial intelligence while racing with China in the industry. But Xi, the leader of the U.S.’s biggest competitor in economic and technology fields such as AI, has ties to the U.S. of his own, with friends in Muscatine.Xi first traveled to the U.S. in 1985 to study American agriculture in rural Iowa when he was a county secretary in the Chinese Communist Party. While in the U.S., Xi befriended Sarah and Roger Lande, a married couple from Muscatine, who organized then-31-year-old Xi’s visit to their eastern Iowa town. The Landes helped coordinate a homestay in Muscatine for Xi when the town’s hotel rooms were booked full, according to Voice of America. Through this visit, Xi became lifelong friends with the Landes. Roger Lande died in 2022.During Xi’s 1985 visit, he also befriended Terry Branstad, the then-governor of Iowa and, decades later, the U.S. ambassador to China.Xi has kept his ties to the Iowa delegation that hosted him in the 1980s, meeting the group, including the Landes and Branstad, in 2012, when he traveled to the U.S. as China’s vice president and again in 2023 to meet then-President Joe Biden in San Francisco.President Donald Trump appointed Branstad in his first term as the U.S. ambassador to China. Xi also led China as president at that time.“You were the first people I met in America, and to me, you are America,” Xi reportedly said to Sarah Lande about his Iowa friends.Xi and Sarah Lande have maintained a long-distance friendship through writing letters, according to Business Insider. Xi called his bond with the state of Iowa “indissoluble” in one letter to Sarah Lande.“The Chinese and American people are both great people and our friendship is not only a valuable asset, but also an important foundation for the development of bilateral relations,” Xi wrote in the 2022 letter. “The Chinese people are ready to keep on joining the American people in strengthening friendly exchanges, pushing forward mutually beneficial cooperation, and jointly promoting the well-being of the two peoples.”AI LEADERS TO ATTEND STATE DINNER WITH XI JINPING: REPORTThe University of Iowa hails Sarah Lande, who graduated in 1960, as a citizen diplomat for her friendship with Xi through the U.S. and China’s historically adversarial relationship.Xi will meet with Trump at the White House on Thursday for China’s state dinner.