THE present and the future — President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping — sat face to face across the conference table in Beijing.

Trump’s state visit on May 13-15 was their seventh face-to-face encounter. Although Trump has visited China only twice (in November 2017, and now in May 2026), Xi Jinping has been to the US multiple times since 1985. Most famously in 2017, he travelled to Trump’s vacation home at Mar-a-Lago, Florida. Xi knows the US like the back of Trump’s hand.

Rather like the movements in Japanese Kabuki dance dramas, every Chinese gesture has significance. When Trump was received on arrival by the senior but insignificant Chinese Vice President Han Zheng, the slight was undoubtedly intentional.

President Trump took with him a posse of 17 top CEOs, including Elon Musk of Tesla/SpaceX, Tim Cook of Apple, and the heads of BlackRock, Blackstone, Boeing, Citigroup, GE Aerospace, and Mastercard — collectively worth over $1 trillion. President Xi shook hands with Trump’s party. All were responsive, except for the unsmiling, unbending Pete Hegseth, who wanted to assert that he was the US secretary of war. (Shades of Britain’s first envoy Earl Macartney who, in 1793, refused to kowtow to Emperor........

© Dawn