The prevailing view about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s State visit to the US late last month is that it was high on pageantry and low on substance. This misses the broader point: Modest deliverables were expected, and the visit was never about concrete outcomes; but it also consolidated a new stage in the recalibrated great power relationship and showed how US President Donald Trump and Xi are managing the changing equilibrium.

The gestures were extraordinary. Trump received Xi on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, something no US President had done for a visiting leader (except the Pope) since 1962. This was the two presidents’ third meeting in less than a year. Two more are fixed: APEC in Shenzhen in November and the G20 in Miami in December.

The recalibration began with China’s forceful retaliation against Trump’s so-called Liberation Day tariffs of April 2, 2025, with matching tariffs and, more tellingly, leveraging of its near monopoly over rare earth magnets. Alarm in the American markets pushed Washington towards a tactical truce — the Busan understanding of October 30, 2025. At the Beijing summit in May this year, the US accepted the Chinese relationship template of “constructive strategic stability”.

In Washington, the year-long Busan truce was extended by just two months, to January 10. Tariff relief was agreed on $30 billion of “non- sensitive” goods each way. A China-US AI dialogue and an incident-communication channel were established. Both sides agreed to operationalise a trade board.

The two readouts diverge sharply. Beijing led with the relationship formula as its headline outcome; Washington........

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