After Beijing’s summit spectacle, Trump sells Xi’s image back home

U.S. President Donald Trump gushed over Chinese President Xi Jinping during a Fox News interview aired during his Beijing trip last week, where Xi welcomed him with a red-carpet arrival, military pageantry and a visit to the Temple of Heaven. “He’s tall. Very tall,” Trump told Sean Hannity, adding that people in China “tend to be a little bit shorter.” The remarks carried Beijing’s summit imagery into American television after two days of tightly choreographed appearances alongside the Chinese leader.

Xi opened the visit at the Temple of Heaven, the imperial complex where Chinese emperors once performed ceremonies tied to harvests and political legitimacy. Chinese state television devoted extended coverage to Trump and Xi touring the site together, one of the summit’s most heavily promoted visuals.

The Beijing meetings also gave Trump access to Zhongnanhai, the heavily guarded leadership compound beside the Forbidden City that serves as the center of Communist Party power. Xi noted during the visit that foreign leaders are rarely brought inside the compound.

The trip recalled Trump’s 2017 visit to China, when Xi hosted him inside the Forbidden City for a state dinner rarely granted to foreign heads of government after 1949. This time, Xi again placed the meetings inside locations closely tied to Chinese political history and state authority.

Xi notably used the summit’s opening remarks to reference the “Thucydides Trap,” the theory that conflict can emerge when a rising power challenges an established one. He asked whether China and the U.S. could avoid that outcome by building “a new model of major-country relations,” adding that “the broad Pacific Ocean has enough space for both China and the United States.”

Trump’s interview with Hannity focused heavily on the reception Xi gave him in Beijing. After Hannity compared the trip’s pageantry with earlier presidential visits to China, Trump said, “We were treated very well,” adding that the reception reflected “respect for our country.”

Trump then turned from the spectacle to Xi himself. “If you went to Hollywood and you look for a leader of China to play a role in a movie, he’s central casting,” Trump said after describing Xi as unusually tall for China.

While China announced plans to purchase 200 Boeing aircraft during the trip, neither side announced changes involving Taiwan policy or U.S. restrictions on advanced AI chip exports. Trump later responded on Truth Social to Xi’s remarks about the “Thucydides Trap,” arguing that references to American decline applied to the Biden administration rather than his own. “Two years ago, we were, in fact, a Nation in decline,” Trump wrote. Xi did not specifically mention Biden in the statement.

Observers said the Beijing visit relied heavily on pageantry to shape the atmosphere around the summit. In a piece for The Conversation, Xianda Huang, a Ph.D. student in Asian languages and cultures at UCLA, wrote that “diplomacy often masquerades as theater.” Pointing to the sequence of carefully managed visuals surrounding the visit, he described the trip as “a traveling display of American political and corporate power” met by equally deliberate symbolism from Beijing.

Lars Ulrik Thom, a Beijing-based historian and founder of Beijing Postcards, said the settings projected continuity and permanence. “It’s a very good backdrop to telling Donald Trump and the world that China’s here and has been here for thousands of years,” Thom told Reuters. Huang wrote that the summit’s “more interesting story” unfolded outside the meeting room through “images, gestures and cultural symbolism on display.”