TIME

Beyond the optics of U.S. President Donald Trump’s sojourn to Beijing—the cheering schoolchildren brandishing the Stars and Stripes, the battalion of tech executives accompanying the American leader—the overarching message was one of “constructive strategic stability,” as Chinese President Xi Jinping himself put it.
The two powers, both leaders seemed to convey, view each other as rivals—but they also didn’t want ties to unravel. And Trump was surely pleased with Xi’s pledge to U.S. CEOs that “China’s door will only open wider” to their businesses, according to Chinese state media.
Not that they don’t have any differences. In closed-door discussions with the American president, Xi made sure to warn that the superpowers could “collide or even enter into conflict” over Taiwan, the self-ruling island which China claims sovereignty. Taiwan, Xi said, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, “is the most important issue in China-U.S. relations.”
Against this backdrop, Trump gave a fist pump at the door of Air Force One as he departed Beijing Friday afternoon, while a cheering crowd waved more U.S. flags. He will no doubt hail the trip as a triumph. In China, it will be seen as the marker of a bigger shift. As Sung Wen-ti, a scholar focused on China’s leadership at the Australian National University, put it: “China showed that they have established themselves clearly as a peer to the U.S."
Read more about how the Trump-Xi meeting showed a new world order at the link in bio.
Photograph by Kenny Holston—Pool Photo/AP