Trump Breaks With Six Decades of Protocol to Personally Welcome Xi to Washington

When Donald Trump was waiting on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews on the afternoon of September 23, it was the detail Chinese viewers registered first. The US president and first lady Melania Trump had come to the base outside Washington to meet Xi Jinping and Peng Liyuan in person as they stepped off Air China's 747 onto the red carpet — a personal airport welcome American presidents, analysts were quick to note, have not extended to a visiting head of state in more than sixty years. "A US president going to the airport to greet a guest is very rare," Wu Xinbo, dean of Fudan University's Institute of International Studies, told China News Service.

The scale of the welcome carried the message. Phoenix TV's reporter Hu Ling, broadcasting from the base, counted six F-22 stealth fighters and eight F-16s drawn up along the airfield; her report quoted officers calling it a "historic welcome ceremony" to which the US side attached great importance, and noted that Trump arriving at the airport himself had already broken a convention of more than six decades. State television tracked Trump waving as Xi's motorcade pulled away.

Xi will be in the United States from September 23 to 25 at Trump's invitation, and the symmetry is the point. The two countries' leaders have now paid each other state visits within half a year — a sequence CCTV's news account called of "historic, milestone significance." As HK01 noted in its coverage of the red-carpet, gun-salute reception, this is also Xi's first trip to the United States in eleven years. Caixin's report of the arrival quoted the warm greetings exchanged at the foot of the stairs.

The tone was set before the wheels stopped. In remarks carried across Chinese platforms, Xi said "China and the United States are both great countries, and the Chinese and American peoples are both great peoples," and that the two countries should be partners rather than rivals. Along the route from the airport, crowds waved giant national flags and sang "My Motherland," the 1956 film song that functions as shorthand for national pride — an image that sat near the top of Baidu's search board the morning the visit broke. Beijing had spent the run-up rehearsing the friendship register: state media devoted days to retelling the century-old Kuliang story of American summer residents and their neighbours in a Fujian hill town as a prelude to the trip.

Marco Rubio told HK01 that Trump may hold further exchanges with Chinese leaders at the APEC and G20 summits later in the year. The talks run through September 25; the red carpet has done its part, and what the two days of meetings add to it is the question both capitals are now watching.