Picture the scene at the Great Hall of the People on a chilly morning in May, frost winking in wan sunshine through the tall windows and in the chill of the vestibule where the two delegations assemble. As always, taking care of business trumps any show of diplomacy. Texting in public is, of course, another compulsive tic now; in a dopamine economy, distraction rules. Between the two crushes of state and private capitalists runs a strip of red carpet wide enough to land a tycoon’s private jet.

On one side, the Chinese gang: Wang Yi, Zheng Shanjie and the assembled apparatus of the world’s most patient state, their faces arranged into the fixed rictus of cautious cordiality that Chinese officials can keep up for hours without effort, phones held at their sides at the regulation angle, eyes forward, waiting. Every last detail is orchestrated. Nothing is left to chance.

And at the head of his line, Xi Jinping in cobalt blue, a deep, saturated, confident cobalt with a hint of sapphire, the blue of Ming dynasty imperial porcelain, a colour that advances toward you rather than retreating, a colour that says: we made this, we have always made this, we are still here.

On the other side, Trump’s mob: a gaggle of the richest private citizens on earth, ruddy from the previous evening’s state banquet and the unaccustomed speed-dating pace of diplomatic carousing, shuffling slightly, checking burner phones with the reflexive anxiety of men who risk millions on acquired attention deficit disorder, po-faced, solemn, trying to act like statesmen and managing somehow only to showcase the grifter, the spiv and the hard-nosed chancer in their makeup.

At the head of their line, a portly Trump in Washington navy, the rig for formal occasions, the suit that every Treasury Secretary, every K Street lawyer and every Senator reaching for seriousness without risk has worn since Eisenhower. The colour of the institution rather than the man. Safe. Correct. The chromatic equivalent of a firm handshake and a noncommittal nod.

There is an additional irony that will not have been lost on the joint chiefs: navy is the colour of American sea power, of the carrier groups that project hard force across the Pacific, the same carrier groups now pulled from the Indo-Pacific to the Persian Gulf with their munitions depleted and their deterrent thinning. Xi wears the blue of five centuries of Chinese civilisational confidence. Trump wore the blue of a navy that was somewhere else. In the battle of the haberdashery, as in the battle of the summit itself, one side knew exactly what it was wearing and why. The other was playing it safe. If there were a safe play left.

It was, in its way, a funeral. Not quite a state funeral, more in the fashion of a farewell for a mob boss of the old school, when the two families send their representatives to stand on opposite sides of the room, nobody weeping, everybody watching and the floral arrangements uber-extravagant. The deceased, in this case, was the proposition that the United States arrives at the negotiating table from a position of strength. Any fool could see the US is already in irretrievable decline. Beyond all life support.

Somebody should have told Donald Trump before he left Washington. But nobody ever tells Donald Trump anything.

Trump had promised Xi a delegation of “distinguished representatives from the American business community.” What he delivered was something rather more instructive: a travelling circus of the self-interested, a mobile monument to the proposition that capital has no country and loyalty has a market price. As Gore Vidal put it, the United States has one political party and it is the Property Party, with two right wings. The Beijing delegation was the Property Party in full plumage, boarding Air Force One like shareholders at an extraordinary general meeting called to protect their Chinese investments from the consequences of their patron’s own policies.

And so the Property Party boarded Air Force One, briefcases in hand, ready to barter with the very government their own had spent a decade demonising.

There was Elon Musk, the world’s richest man-child at a declared $688 billion, worth more than most sovereign nations and about as accountable to their citizens. Musk had spent 2025 publicly accusing Trump of paedophilia-adjacent associations, which, in most social circles, marks the end of a friendship. In the oligarch circle, it marks a brief interruption before the next available junket. He boarded Air Force One. He told reporters in Beijing that he hoped to accomplish “many good things.” The Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory, which produced 292,876 vehicles in the first four months of 2026, needed its supply chains undisturbed. Musk is a man of principle, and the best principle a venture capitalist’s borrowed money can buy.

There was Jensen Huang of Nvidia, added to the passenger list at a refuelling stop in Alaska like a last-minute standby passenger boarding a delayed flight to somewhere he very urgently needed to be. Huang wanted China cleared to buy the H200 chips. China declined. China is developing its own. Huang said the preliminary meetings had gone “excellently,” which, in the diplomatic register of a man whose company’s China market share has fallen from 95 per cent to effectively zero, is a word that has done considerable violence to its original meaning.

There was Tim Cook of Apple, on his farewell tour of the only relationship that has ever truly mattered to Apple’s production economics, the one with the country that manufactures 80 per cent of its iPhones. Cook has spent a decade perfecting the art of standing next to American presidents while thinking about Zhengzhou. He has survived tariffs, trade wars and two Trump administrations through the cultivation of what might be called strategic docility: agree to invest $600 billion in America, move some production to India, keep the exemptions coming, never raise your voice. A man born for the room.

There was Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, $47.5 billion, a named college at Tsinghua University and a decades-long career as what the Washington Post has called Trump’s “China whisperer.” Schwarzman attended the summit having already been received by China’s Vice Premier at the Great Hall of the People three weeks earlier, in late April, for what Xinhua described as a “meeting” and what everyone in the room understood as a preview. He has spent thirty years building cultural and financial infrastructure between Wall Street and Beijing. He was not in Beijing to negotiate. He was in Beijing because Beijing is partly his.

There was Larry Fink of BlackRock, the man who manages more money than the GDP of every country except America and China, who has spent years arguing that the future of global finance runs through China while intermittently explaining to American pension holders that this is all very much in their interest.

There was David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, Jane Fraser of Citigroup and Dina Powell McCormick representing Meta, and executives from Mastercard, Visa, Cargill, GE Aerospace, Micron, Qualcomm, Coherent, Illumina and Cisco, a roster that read less like a diplomatic delegation than like the Fortune 500 index taking a package tour, briefcases in overhead lockers, anxious about connecting flights and access agreements.

Vonnegut would have recognised them instantly. He would have given them a simple epitaph in the manner of Slaughterhouse-Five: so it goes. So it goes with men who have built empires on the assumption that the rules of the game never change and who now find themselves on a government aircraft, dependent on a man they privately regard as a figure of fun, flying to a country their own government has spent a decade designating a strategic rival to ask permission to continue doing business as usual. The turkey died years ago. But the pickings, as any experienced scavenger knows, remain good for a surprisingly long time.

Fitzgerald would have seen them differently, would have caught the quality of their eager attention during the welcome ceremony, the way men of immense wealth can still arrange their faces into expressions of modest gratitude when a sufficiently large market is dangled before them. He understood that the very rich are different from you and me, and the difference is not, as Hemingway assumed, merely that they have more money. The difference is that they have learned to make their appetite look like benevolence, their self-interest look like statecraft and their annual shareholder returns look like the national interest.

Xi received them with the warmth of a man who had just been told that his leverage was complete. He assured them that American companies “will have broader prospects in China.” They nodded. The prospects, of course, were contingent on Trump’s behaviour regarding Taiwan, on the removal of sanctions and on the question of export controls, and on approximately forty other matters still under negotiation. But in the room, in the moment, with the red carpet down and the photographers positioned, the prospects felt real. That is the genius of Chinese diplomatic hospitality. The room is always warm. The bill arrives later.

Trump watched his delegation and glowed. These were his people: proof that the great and the powerful gathered when he called. He did not appear to notice, or perhaps noticed and did not care, that every last one of them was there for China’s market, not his vision. That they had come not to serve American interests but to protect their own. That the “distinguished representatives of the American business community” were, in the plainest sense, representatives of nothing but their own balance sheets, making the same calculations that capital has always made across every border and beneath every flag since the first merchant learned that politics is just commerce at a higher price point.

So it goes.

The summit was billed as a civilisation-level reset between the world’s two largest economies. What it delivered was a trade show where the American vendor kept marking down his prices before the Chinese buyer had even walked through the door. Before Trump had set foot on Chinese soil, his administration had already suspended a $13 billion arms sale to Taiwan and approved the export of Nvidia’s advanced H200 AI chips to Chinese tech giants. Both were concessions Beijing had been pressing for. Both were handed over in advance. In diplomatic tradecraft, you do not give away your opening positions before the negotiation begins. But then, tradecraft requires knowing you are in a negotiation.

On the headline deal, Boeing aircraft, China agreed to 200 jets. Trump’s own pre-trip boast had been 500. The industry had been told to expect at least that. Markets responded accordingly: Boeing shares fell 4 per cent. Investors understood something Trump apparently did not: 200 planes is not a deal, it is an instalment on a discount. China is simultaneously rolling out its own homegrown C919 passenger aircraft with considerable national fanfare. As one Singapore-based professor of international relations observed with considerable restraint, the headline numbers look impressive but “we’ve seen this movie before,” and whether China follows through is a very large question indeed.

On Iran, the war Trump started, the Strait of Hormuz blockade that has the IMF warning of global recession, there was precisely nothing. Trump announced that Xi had “strongly” promised not to supply weapons to Iran. As Foreign Policy’s James Palmer pointed out, that promise “means nothing, since any Chinese military aid to Tehran is already under the table.” China’s foreign ministry spokesman, reading from a different script entirely, said the conflict “should never have happened” and “has no need to continue.” Two readouts. Two realities. One side was conducting diplomacy. The other was performing it.

The Taiwan passage of the summit was the most revealing of all. Xi placed the island front and centre from the opening session, warning that mishandling the issue could put the entire relationship “in great jeopardy” and lead to “clashes and even conflicts.” China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi subsequently told state media that Beijing had sensed Trump “understands China’s position,” language that, in diplomatic terms, is tantamount to claiming a concession without requiring one to be signed.

Trump’s response, in a Fox News interview taped in Beijing, was to describe Taiwan as “a very small island” 59 miles from “a very powerful, big country” 9,500 miles from the United States and to advise both sides to “cool it.” He then called the arms sale to Taiwan “a very good negotiating chip.” A bipartisan group of US senators had written to him before departure explicitly warning him not to treat Taiwan’s defence as a bargaining tool. He took the advice of Xi instead.

The defining image of the two days belongs not to any signed document or handshake at the Great Hall of the People. It belongs to the Ming Dynasty Temple of Heaven, where Trump and Xi stood side by side while reporters asked whether they had discussed Taiwan. The man who pulls 5,000 troops from Germany as punishment for a perceived slight, that man went silent. “China is beautiful,” he eventually offered. Rubio scrambled to insist US Taiwan policy was “unchanged.” The optics had already travelled around the world.

Xi, for his part, deployed the Thucydides Trap, the historical thesis that a rising power and a declining one tend to end in war, and used it to frame the US as the declining party. Trump did not push back. He agreed with Xi and later defended the agreement on Truth Social, explaining that Xi must have been referring to Biden-era damage. It is difficult to imagine any previous American president conceding in Beijing that the United States is a nation in decline, however cleverly the blame was then redistributed.

Australia’s own Nick Bisley, professor of international relations at La Trobe University, captured the structural significance with clinical precision. China’s long-standing argument, he told Time Magazine, has always been that America behaves as a “thuggish, self-interested warmonger.” This Beijing summit, he said, “ticks the box.”

The deeper architecture of what happened in Beijing is this: China entered the meeting, as CSIS senior adviser Scott Kennedy observed, “far more confident than in 2017, when it feared even a small rise in US tariffs.” That confidence was not accidental. It was constructed, brick by brick, through Beijing’s methodical retaliation against Liberation Day tariffs, its rare earth export controls that kneecapped American manufacturing supply chains, its energy resilience in the face of the Iran-war oil shock and its patient accumulation of soft power across the Global South while Washington’s image burned. China came to this summit having already won the opening rounds. The summit formalised the score.

What did the US come away with? A commitment to “constructive strategic stability,” diplomatic boilerplate that means roughly nothing and commits China to precisely nothing. A promise of 200 Boeing jets that markets immediately discounted. A vague pledge from Xi to “help” on Iran, which China’s own foreign ministry walked back in tone and substance within hours. The right to sell Nvidia H200 chips to Chinese companies, companies that have already told Nvidia they will not be placing orders because they intend to develop their own. And an invitation to Xi to visit the White House in September, which gives Beijing a second summit to extract further concessions from an increasingly diminished interlocutor.

Trump crowed about the “magnificent welcome.” Xi gave him that, certainly. The pomp was spectacular: the honour guard, the Temple of Heaven, the banquet in the Golden Room and the children with their little flags. In the art of mian zi, the Chinese concept of dignity and status, Xi gave Trump the appearance of equality while quietly extracting the substance of advantage. The chips, the arms sales and the silence on Taiwan, those were the real currency, and those moved in one direction only. Trump mistook the theatre for the transaction.

The two long lines of craven sycophants at the Great Hall of the People knew exactly what kind of funeral they were attending. The Chinese delegation kept their phones at the regulation angle and their faces perfectly still. The Americans shuffled, checked their burner screens, and tried to look as though they belonged in the room, before binning everything at the foot of the stairs on the way out.

The man who says he wrote The Art of the Deal, when everyone knows he paid Michael Wolff to write it for him, sat across the table from a grandmaster of strategic patience and walked away thinking he’d won because the room was beautiful.

China is, indeed, beautiful, Mr Trump. The question is who is doing the decorating now.

Next: How Beijing’s long game in the Global South is rewriting the rules of diplomacy, and why Washington isn’t even at the table.