“I think Trump will be intrigued by it because Trump is very interested in infrastructure and he wants to upgrade American infrastructure and look for opportunities for US businesses,” Gal Luft, co-director of the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, said.

In Obama’s last years in the White House, Beijing and Washington frequently used their common cause in cutting greenhouse gases to salvage relations mired in mistrust over conflicting security and trade interests.

China’s sovereign wealth fund wants to invest in the US infrastructure rebuild, chairman says

But things have changed dramatically less than three months into Trump’s presidency, with the former real estate mogul aggressively backtracking on Obama’s climate policy. “During Obama’s time climate change was sort of the magical issue the two sides always resorted to and they found common ground,” Luft said. “But with Trump, he couldn’t care less about climate change.”

Ma Zhengang, a former Chinese ambassador to Britain and former president of the China ­Institute of International Studies, said climate change had almost become an “off-limits” issue for Trump, and Xi was unlikely to bring it up during his US trip.

“We have to understand and live with the fact that every US president has a different personality, especially in the case of Trump,” Ma said. “Apart from setting the tone for bilateral ties for the next four years, the world is watching if they will manage to produce some tangible results on various specific issues.”

Observers said it would be a big achievement if Trump and Xi could find something during the talks that they were both ­personally interested in and could work together on.

“They’ll need an issue, what I call the glue, that can replace ­climate change as the binding ­factor in the relations,” Luft said.

Xi first aired the belt-and-road initiative in 2013 as part of ­Beijing’s effort to project its power in Asia and beyond. It was largely welcomed in many parts of the world but not by the Obama ­administration.

Trump is a big advocate of increasing infrastructure spending on a massive scale to boost the economy and create jobs. And observers say that is where China’s growing economic and investment clout could come in.

Brian Gao, president of the ­Detroit Chinese Business Association, said many Chinese firms were keen to be part of US infrastructure projects because this played to their strength.

“Infrastructure projects, from our perspective, do not involve national security,” Gao said.

Much is riding on this week’s summit and, during a phone conversation with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Sunday, State Councillor Yang Jiechi urged Washington to make sure the summit was a “complete success”, state media reported. Tillerson, whose trip to Beijing last month paved way for the summit, said Washington would do its utmost to prepare for Xi’s visit and make sure it would generate positive outcomes, ­according to Xinhua.

The leaders are likely to touch on a familiar list of issues, with ­rising tensions on the Korean peninsula expected to top their agenda, analysts said.

In an interview with the Financial Times published yesterday, Trump said he would urge Xi to take a tougher stand against Pyongyang’s accelerated nuclear weapons programme, threatening to take unilateral action to eliminate the danger from North Korea. “Yes, we will talk about North Korea,” Trump was quoted as saying. “And China has great ­influence over North Korea … if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.”

Ma said that although North Korea was an urgent issue for China and the US, it remained to be seen if they would have enough time to narrow their differences.

“Apparently, Trump has yet to articulate a clear policy on North Korea and Xi will have a lot of ­explaining to do considering the fact that Trump does not appear to really understand China’s ­position on the issue,” Ma said.

Andrew Nathan, a veteran China-watcher at Columbia University in New York, said Xi did not have the will or the ability to really solve the North Korea problem in the way the US leader would wish.

“Xi may be able to persuade Trump to issue some goodwill ­signals to North Korea as a way of testing whether negotiations are possible,” Nathan said.

Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London, also said the tricky part would be getting a deal that would publicly satisfy both Trump and Xi.

“Trump probably wants tangible help over North Korea, but Xi just needs to project that the ­summit went well without giving away much from China,” he said.

Besides, China’s influence on North Korea had often been exaggerated. “If North Korea is a gift in Xi’s pocket, handing it to Trump would not be a big deal as it would not cost Beijing much – in ­contrast to trade, for example – but North Korea is not Xi’s to give,” Tsang said.

Most analysts said the summit was unlikely to produce substantive outcomes because none of the issues at hand, such as the South China Sea, Taiwan, currency and trade imbalance, had solutions at the moment.

“I don’t expect any progress on the South China Sea dispute,” Nathan said. “The Chinese would like a US commitment to one China. I hope Trump will be smart enough to refrain from any change to the existing formula that the US follows a one-China policy.”

Luft said Beijing and Washington were unlikely to inch closer on a much-talked-about bilateral investment treaty. “For China, it means major reforms, such as opening certain sectors of China’s economy to foreign investors, and I don’t think China is willing to do right now,” he said.

For Trump, treaties and agreements were premature because they needed to be ratified by the US Congress.

“I think they’ll need to focus on things that are in their powers and go for things that are simple, constructive, and don’t require involving US congress,” Luft said.

Scott Kennedy, of the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said in an article published on the think tank’s website that Trump would also have to make himself understood in clearer terms about “what the US wants China to do to address its concerns”.

Additional reporting by Robert Delaney