On May 14, China’s top leader Xi Jinping took U.S. President Donald Trump to the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, where the two men posed for a photo in front of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. English reports treated the visit to the Temple of Heaven as a mere formality between negotiations – the phrase “followed by a visit to the Temple of Heaven” was often sandwiched between Xi’s warning on Taiwan and soy trade issues.
However, if we compare the locations chosen for each US president’s visit to China, we will see that the diplomatic settings organized by China are an exposition of Beijing’s discourse on the source of its legitimacy and signals for its political leaning.
This story dates back to Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. Although Nixon visited Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai, the official reception took place in Beijing. The state banquet and discussions were centered around the Great Hall of the People, a building constructed in 1959. It was deliberately designed to negate imperial heritage, with a name incorporating “the people” and architecture. emphasize revolutionary modernity – grandiose, symmetrical and de-decorated. After the banquet, Nixon was to attend the revolutionary ballet “The Red Detachment of Women.” The message from Beijing was clear: we are a new regime breaking with the past, our legitimacy resulting from the revolution.
During this period, China’s top leader never personally accompanied foreign heads of state on sightseeing visits. Mao Zedong met Nixon only once, in his office in Zhongnanhai; the American president was accompanied by Vice Premier Li Xiannian at the Great Wall and by Marshal Ye Jianying at the Forbidden City.
Three years later, President Gerald Ford’s visit to China in 1975 included the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace and the Great Wall – a standard tourist itinerary with an assistant leader, without any political narrative.
After reform and opening up, China intentionally downplayed the revolutionary narrative, now focusing on showcasing its civilization. Ronald Reagan’s trip to Xi’an in 1984 marked the first time a U.S. president was taken to a cultural site outside of Beijing, but the framework at the time was still “mutual openness” rather than “civilizational trust.” Reagan even used the Terracotta Army as a negative metaphor in his speech at Fudan University: “Generations will therefore honor us for having begun the journey, for having moved forward together and for having escaped the fate of the buried armies of Xi’an, buried warriors who have been frozen in time for centuries, frozen in unconscious enmity. We have made our choice. Our new journey will continue.”
This attitude of viewing tradition as a burden was not an American prejudice, but rather the dominant social thinking in China at the time. The 1988 CCTV documentary “River Elegy” contained a scathing critique of traditional Chinese civilization.
By the time of Bill Clinton’s visit to China in 1998, Beijing’s presentation strategy had clearly shifted to emphasize “diversity” and “openness.” Clinton’s nine-day itinerary was designed to cover five cities with very different cultural landscapes: Xi’an, Beijing, Shanghai, Guilin and Hong Kong. Jiang Zemin then authorized Clinton to deliver a live-streamed speech on human rights and democracy at Peking University.
The narrative presented here was that China is a diverse and open country with ancient capitals, natural landscapes, and modern cities, and that it allows the American president to speak openly to students about human rights and political freedom. It was no longer a revolutionary nation with only red flags, nor the regime that drove tanks into Tiananmen Square. Four years later, in 2002, George W. Bush was also scheduled to deliver a speech at Tsinghua University, a university founded by the United States after the Boxers were compensated.
The opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics marked the culmination of this logic. Zhang Yimou compressed thousands of years of civilization into a visual spectacle, and the official slogan “One World, One Dream” bluntly declared the narrative goal: China embraces the world and the world accepts China. It was not only a cultural demonstration, but also a means for the Communist Party consolidate its political legitimacy.
During these events, Beijing mainly presented rather than told. The role of the highest leader remained limited to formal receptions within the Great Hall of the People; the sightseeing tours were organized by the MPs, without incorporating the leader’s personal account. This practice was broken by Xi Jinping in 2014. He brought Barack Obama to Yingtai in Zhongnanhai – personally accompany and explain the procedures. Xi transformed himself into a storyteller, a role reversal that was itself a political act.
Yingtai is an artificial island that occupies a unique place in modern Chinese history: Empress Dowager Cixi imprisoned the reform-minded Emperor Guangxu there in 1898 after the failure of the Hundred Days Reform until his death ten years later. Yingtai is a spatial symbol of the suppression of reforms. However, Xi Jinping’s “history lesson” completely bypassed Guangxu. He spoke of Emperor Kangxi’s decision to retake Taiwan from there, stating that “Chinese civilization has valued ‘great unity’ from the beginning.” He thus redefined Yingtai from a prison for reformers to a decision-making arena for the drive for unification.
When Trump visited China in 2017, the place was transformed into the Forbidden City. The two heads of state and their wives visited the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the Hall of Central Harmony and the Hall of Preserved Harmony along the central axis. The three rooms contain the character “harmony”, which Chinese official media interpreted as “value harmony above all else.”
During the visit, Xi mentioned that China has a 5,000-year history of civilization. Trump interjected by saying that Egypt has a history of 8,000 years or more. Xi acknowledged that Egypt was indeed ahead, but immediately corrected himself: “The only continuous civilization that has lasted to the present day is China. We are also the original people. Black hair, yellow skin, passed down from generation to generation, we are called the descendants of the dragon.“In an imperial palace, facing a foreign head of state, the leader of a modern nation defined the continuity of civilization by lineage and skin color. It was not an idle speech, but an impromptu exercise in legitimacy theory.
To describe the level of reception of Trump in 2017, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs invented a new protocol category: “state visit-plus.” The need for a diplomatic system to create new categories beyond existing levels of etiquette implies that Beijing believes that the standard language of international etiquette derived from the Westphalian system is insufficient to express what it means.
In 2026, Xi accompanied Trump to the Temple of Heaven – the communication space between the emperor and heaven, the material support of the concept of the Mandate of Heaven. Xi told Trump outside Good Harvest Prayer Hall: “Ancient Chinese leaders held prayer ceremonies here for the prosperity of the nation, the happiness of the people and good harvests, which embodies the traditional Chinese philosophy that people are the foundation of a country and only when people lead a good life can the country prosper. »
Xi immediately continued: “In pursuing and developing the people-centered philosophy in Chinese civilization, the Chinese Communist Party has remained committed to the constant mission of serving the people wholeheartedly. » There was no transition between the emperor’s sacrifices to Heaven and the legitimacy of the Communist Party’s power. According to Xi, party control and the Mandate of Heaven had the same origin.
Furthermore, Beijing’s diplomatic maneuvers are not simply about selecting locations, but about rewriting the historical significance of those locations domestically through external events to fit its changing political agenda. Yingtai’s memories of reform were overlaid with a narrative of unification. The Forbidden City went from a “Palace of Blood and Tears” (as it was considered in Mao’s era) into a “unique symbol of Chinese civilization” in Xi’s era. The Temple of Heaven, once a space of imperial sacrifices, is reinterpreted as a symbol of “the Chinese worldview” – the political and theological significance of the worship of Heaven is translated into cultural philosophy and its heritage.
Each selection of location was accompanied by a semantic cleansing: preserving the grandeur of the space, eliminating its political dangers and injecting the narrative necessary for the current regime. As Guang Yang recently analyzed in The DiplomatBeijing excels at using word substitution to prepare the discourse for political changes before or after the fact. The same logic applies to diplomatic spaces: the physical structure of the place remains unchanged, but the historical meaning it is allowed to convey is discreetly replaced.
Diplomatic protocol is never just protocol. The choice of location in the United States also sends signals: the White House is the standard institutional arrangement, Camp David suggests a special alliance, and Mount Vernon or private estates mark personal relationships. But Beijing has a different grammar. The half-century journey from the Great Hall of the People to the Temple of Heaven suggests that China’s choice of diplomatic framework is a materialized expression of its theory of state legitimacy, and can therefore be read, followed and predicted. Only by understanding this can we more accurately judge what Beijing intends to say next. What he means includes, but is not limited to, the following three points:
First, the framework regarding Taiwan is changing. In the revolutionary narrative, the Taiwan question is about “liberation,” while in the civilized empire narrative, it is about “unification” – the restoration of imperial order. It remains to be seen when and to what extent this same narrative pattern will extend to other parts of the “East Asian world.”
Second, the deeper logic of the policy of “Sinicization of religion” has become clearer. If the legitimacy of the Communist Party has changed from “revolution” to “secular successor to the Mandate of Heaven,” then it must monopolize not only religious organizations, but also the very right to define what is sacred. The use of the Temple of Heaven as a diplomatic setting coincides with this broader shift.
Third, the narrative of legitimacy has shifted from the revolution of the Mao era or the international order of the reform and opening-up period to that of a “civilized empire,” thereby changing Beijing’s sensitivity to external criticism. Regimes that rely on revolutionary narratives worry about ideological revisionism; regimes that depend on the international order depend on the legitimacy of their performance. But what about regimes that rely on the narrative of a civilized empire? This is a question that must be taken seriously and explored thoroughly.