Before the Summit, China's State Media Retells the Century-Old Kuliang Story of US-China Friendship
On the eve of Xi Jinping's state visit to the United States, the top of Baidu's trending board belongs to the Kuliang friends: American families whose mountain summers above Fuzhou, a Flying Tigers pilot's ashes in the Min River and daughters named Love China and Love China Splendid supply the human case for the summit.
The top trending topic in China on the day before a state visit is rarely accidental. As Xi Jinping prepared to fly to Washington for a September 23-25 state visit to meet Donald Trump - the leaders' third face-to-face since Busan last October and Beijing in May, as Xinhua's commentary noted - the number-one slot on Baidu's search board went not to trade or Taiwan but to a phrase about a mountain in Fujian: "crossing mountains and seas to continue the Kuliang bond."
Kuliang is a cool-hills retreat above Fuzhou where American missionaries, teachers and traders summered from the late nineteenth century, building stone houses, a hospital and schools. Its revival as a friendship symbol is a Xi project: he hosted returning Kuliang families as a young provincial official, and in June 2023 sent a congratulatory letter to a US-China friendship forum in Fuzhou saying the Kuliang Friends' experience shows the two peoples "can build deep friendship across differences in system, culture and language."
The story retold on Monday, in a CCTV item carried under the banner "Meeting Xi Jinping," runs through one American family. Elyn MacInnis, known in China as Mu Yanling, founded the Kuliang Friends in 2016 to recover the community's records and stories. Her father-in-law Donald MacInnis flew with the wartime Flying Tigers and asked that part of his ashes be scattered in the Min River after his death in 2005; he was the first foreign name carved on a Fuzhou memorial wall to Chinese resistance fighters. Her husband Peter was born in Fuzhou and was carried up the mountain as an infant by a local "Kuliang mama." The family spent three decades in China, and the two daughters were named Aizhong and Aihua - "Love China" and "Love China Splendid." MacInnis first met Xi in person at a San Francisco banquet in November 2023. The framing is spelled out in the idiom CCTV reaches for: "for states to get along, the people must first be close."
The timing is the message. Beijing frames the summit, which comes as trade talks continue in New York, as diplomacy built from the bottom up - people first, leaders second - and the Kuliang story is its favorite illustration because it is old, personal and American. Hong Kong outlets previewing the trip struck harder edges: US media report Xi is expected to travel without a delegation of corporate executives, and German media cite sources saying he will ask Trump face-to-face to stop arms sales to Taiwan.
The site has already laid out what Beijing brings to the second Trump summit; the Kuliang item shows the story Beijing wants told at home. Whether a century-old mountain friendship can carry the weight of a summit week is the open question the trending topic itself poses - and the one its state-media tellers cannot answer.