On September 24, President Donald Trump will welcome Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping to Washington for one of the most consequential meetings between the leaders of the world’s two most powerful nations.

Expectations are already building around trade, investment, and other major economic agreements. Xi is reportedly preparing to arrive with an unusually large delegation of Chinese business leaders, while negotiations continue over tariffs, agricultural purchases, and investment. These are important matters that affect American workers, farmers, businesses, and national security.

But as Americans watch for the size of the trade deals announced after this summit, we should also ask another question:

What about communist China’s enormous human rights deficit?

The United States faces significant economic and strategic imbalances with the People’s Republic of China. But there is another imbalance that cannot be measured in billions of dollars, tons of soybeans, or numbers of aircraft purchased. It is measured in prison sentences, demolished churches, disappeared lawyers, separated families, and men and women incarcerated because they dared to exercise freedoms Americans regard as God-given.

America should never accept the premise that it must choose between negotiating over trade and speaking about human rights.

President Ronald Reagan did not make that choice.

When Reagan sat across the negotiating table from the leaders of the Soviet Union, he negotiated nuclear arms reductions while simultaneously raising political prisoners, religious persecution, and fundamental human rights. Arms control did not require abandoning human dignity. Strategic diplomacy did not require moral silence.

The same principle should apply when an American president sits across from the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

And there is compelling recent evidence that presidential intervention can produce results.

Earlier this year, President Trump personally raised the case of Pastor Ezra Mingri Jin, founder of Beijing’s Zion Church, directly with Xi Jinping. Weeks later, Pastor Jin was freed and eventually reunited with his family in the United States.

For those of us who have spent decades advocating for prisoners of conscience in China, that outcome matters enormously.

It demonstrates something important: putting human rights on the agenda does not have to be ceremonial diplomacy. Names matter. Direct presidential intervention matters. Negotiation can produce tangible humanitarian results.

The September 24 summit therefore presents an opportunity to determine whether economic agreements can be accompanied by progress concerning prisoners of conscience and religious freedom.

The names and cases deserving attention include human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, forcibly disappeared since August 2017; Pastor Wang Yi of Chengdu’s Early Rain Covenant Church, serving a nine-year sentence; democracy advocate Dr. Wang Bingzhang; Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, serving a life sentence; imprisoned Christian leaders including Pastor Gao Quanfu; and Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners detained or imprisoned for exercising fundamental freedoms.

And there is one especially urgent humanitarian case: Pastor John Cao.

After completing his seven-year prison sentence in 2024, Pastor Cao remains separated from his family in the United States. His case represents exactly the kind of humanitarian issue that direct leader-to-leader diplomacy can address.

America has traveled down another road before.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton championed Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China as Beijing prepared to enter the World Trade Organization. A central hope underlying engagement was that deeper economic integration and exposure to international institutions would help foster greater openness, the rule of law, and ultimately greater individual freedom.

More than a quarter-century later, history gives us reason to question that assumption.

China became richer. The Chinese Communist Party became more powerful. But economic integration did not automatically produce political liberalization. Instead, under Xi Jinping, Party control over religion, civil society, technology, and political expression has intensified.

Even more troubling, repression no longer necessarily stops at China’s borders.

U.S. authorities have increasingly warned about transnational repression — efforts by authoritarian governments, including the People’s Republic of China, to intimidate, threaten, or silence critics living in the United States and other free societies.

That changes the equation.

Human rights in China cannot simply be dismissed as an internal Chinese matter when the mechanisms of repression increasingly reach across international borders.

Trade matters. Investment matters. Artificial intelligence matters. Strategic stability matters. Taiwan and regional security matter. Preventing military confrontation between two nuclear powers certainly matters.

But human beings matter too.

The September 24 Trump-Xi summit does not require America to choose between economic interests and human freedom. History demonstrates that serious diplomacy can address both.

And recent experience demonstrates that raising the name of a prisoner can help change a life.

When President Trump and Xi Jinping sit down in Washington, the world’s financial markets will be watching for trade and investment announcements.

But prisoners sitting in cells across China — and their wives, husbands, parents, and children waiting outside those prison walls — will be watching for something else.

They will be listening to hear whether America remembers their names.

For them, China’s human rights deficit is not an abstract foreign policy issue. It is measured in birthdays missed, children growing up without parents, years behind bars, families divided across oceans, and sometimes life and death.

Whatever agreements emerge from September 24, the condition of China’s prisoners of conscience, religious freedom, and the rule of law deserves a place in the historical record of this summit alongside trade, investment, and national security.