– This is the script of CNBC's news report for China's CCTV on April 7, Friday.
Welcome to CNBC Business Daily, I'm Qian Chen.
The meeting between the Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Trump in Florida is closely watched by US exporters, as Trump has kept up his belligerent broadsides on China's trade policies.
China, the third-largest U.S. export market, after Canada and Mexico, accounts for nearly $120 billion worth of goods last year.
Trump's talks with China will also set the tone for a wider American trade policy that could create bigger headwinds for U.S. exporters.
Trump has promised broader policies that could restrict the flow of exports on which U.S. companies heavily depend. Those include raising tariffs on trading partners like Mexico and China. Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress have also floated the idea of a "border tax", which could result in cut into U.S. exports, which represent about $2 trillion, or roughly one-eighth of the nation's gross domestic product.
In a recent exclusive interview with CNBC, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Willbur Ross said the Trump administration has not taken a position.
[Willbur Ross, U.S. Secretary of Commerce] "It's a very complex question. It requires some very complex answers. So we're studying it very, very carefully and we know that one of its purposes is to fill a hole that otherwise would exist in the tax proposal. So we're taking it very seriously but the administration has taken no position on this as yet."
A slowdown in trade with China would be felt unevenly across the U.S., with some states hit much harder than others.
Among the most vulnerable dependent: Washington, which sold roughly a quarter of its exports to China last year, or nearly $19 billion worth of goods. Airplanes are the state's largest export by far, and they made up the bulk of the state's sales to China.
California exports some $16 billion to mainland China, with computers and electronics accounting for more than a quarter of the total. Texas was the third-largest exporter to China, with more than $11 billion worth of products that included chemicals, computers and machinery.
Alaska, which exports a smaller volume of goods, sends $1.5 billion worth of its exports - a quarter of its total - to China. Roughly half of that consists of seafood.
U.S. farm states are also big exporters to China, which is the biggest single market for American agricultural products. Some 20 percent of all U.S. farm exports are sold to China, which bought $30 billion worth of food and other farm products in fiscal year 2014, including soybeans, coarse grains, cotton and beef.
While the trade stakes are high, most observers see Thursday's meeting as just the opening round in a series of bilateral talks, with little in the way of concrete immediate policy pronouncements.
CNBC's Qian Chen, reporting from Singapore.