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 posed for a photo standing before the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. English reports treated the visit to the Temple of Heaven as a mere formality between talks – the phrase “followed by a visit to the Temple of Heaven” was often sandwiched between Xi’s warning on Taiwan and soybean trade issues.
However, if we compare the venues chosen for each U.S. president’s visit to China, we will see that the diplomatic settings arranged by China are an exhibition of Beijing’s discourse on the source of its legitimacy and signals for its policy tendency.
This history dates back to Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. Although Nixon visited Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai, the formal reception took place in Beijing. The state banquet and talks were centered around the Great Hall of the People, a building built in 1959. It was purposefully designed to negate the imperial legacy, with a name incorporating “the people” and architecture emphasizing revolutionary modernity – grand, symmetrical, and de-decorated. After the banquet, Nixon was arranged to watch 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 derived from revolution.
During this period, China’s top leader never personally accompanied foreign heads of state on sightseeing tours. Mao Zedong met with Nixon only once, in his study at Zhongnanhai; the U.S. 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 1975 visit to China included the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, and the Great Wall – a standard sightseeing route accompanied by a deputy leader, without any political narrative.
After the reform and opening up, China intentionally downplayed the revolutionary narrative, shifting its focus to showcasing its civilization. Ronald Reagan’s 1984 trip to Xi’an marked the first time a U.S. president had been taken to a cultural site outside of Beijing, but the framework at the time was still “mutual openness” rather than “civilizational confidence.” Reagan even used the Terracotta Army as a negative metaphor in his speech at Fudan University: “Generations hence will honor us for having begun the voyage, for moving on together and escaping the fate of the buried armies of Xi’an, the buried warriors who stood for centuries frozen in time, frozen in an unknowing enmity. We have made our choice. Our new journey will continue.”
This attitude of viewing tradition as a burden was not a prejudice of Americans, but rather the mainstream social thought in China at the time. The 1988 CCTV documentary “River Elegy” contained a strong critique of traditional Chinese civilization.
By the time of Bill Clinton’s 1998 visit to China, Beijing’s presentation strategy had clearly shifted to an emphasis on “diversity” and “openness.” Clinton’s nine-day itinerary was designed to span five cities with very different cultural landscapes: Xi’an, Beijing, Shanghai, Guilin, and Hong Kong. Jiang Zemin then allowed Clinton to give 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 U.S. president to speak openly to students about human rights and political freedom. It was no longer a revolutionary nation with only red flags, nor was it the regime that drove tanks onto Tiananmen Square. Four years later, in 2002, George W. Bush was also scheduled to speak at Tsinghua University, a university founded by the United States after the Boxer Indemnity.
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. This was not only a cultural display, but also a means for the Communist Party to consolidate its political legitimacy.
In these events, Beijing primarily presented rather than narrated. The top leader’s role remained limited to formal receptions within the Great Hall of the People; sightseeing was arranged by deputies, without incorporating the leader’s personal narrative. This practice was broken by Xi Jinping in 2014. He brought Barack Obama to Yingtai in Zhongnanhai – personally accompanying and explaining the proceedings. Xi transformed himself into a storyteller of history, a role reversal that was itself a political act.
Yingtai is an artificial island with a unique place in modern Chinese history: Empress Dowager Cixi imprisoned the Guangxu Emperor, who had championed the reforms, there in 1898 after the failure of the Hundred Days’ Reformation until his death ten years later. Yingtai is a spatial symbol of the suppression of reform. However, Xi Jinping’s “history lesson” completely bypassed Guangxu. He spoke of the Kangxi Emperor’s decision to retake Taiwan from there, stating that “Chinese civilization has valued ‘great unity’ from the very beginning.” He thus redefined Yingtai from a prison for reformers to a decision-making arena for the will to unify.
When Trump visited China in 2017, the venue was upgraded to the Forbidden City. The two heads of state and their spouses visited the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the Hall of Central Harmony, and the Hall of Preserving Harmony along the central axis. All three halls contain the character “harmony,” which China’s official media interpreted as “valuing harmony above all else.”
During the visit, Xi mentioned that China has a 5,000-year history of civilization. Trump interjected, saying that Egypt has an 8,000-year history, or perhaps even older. Xi acknowledged that Egypt is indeed earlier, but immediately corrected himself: “The only continuous civilization that has continued to this day is China. We are also the original people. Black hair, yellow skin, passed down through generations, 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 bloodline and skin color. This was not idle talk, but an impromptu exercise in a theory of legitimacy.
To describe the level of Trump’s 2017 reception, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs invented an unprecedented protocol category: “state visit-plus.” The need for a diplomatic system to create new categories beyond existing levels of etiquette implies that Beijing believes the standard international etiquette language derived from the Westphalian system is insufficient to express what it wants to say.
In 2026, Xi accompanied Trump to the Temple of Heaven – the space for communication between the emperor and heaven, the material carrier of the concept of the Mandate of Heaven. Xi told Trump in front of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests: “Ancient Chinese rulers would hold prayer ceremonies here for prosperity of the nation, happiness of the people and good harvests, which embodies the traditional Chinese ethos that people are the foundation of a country and only when the people lead a good life can the country thrive.”
Xi continued immediately: “Carrying forward and developing the people-centered philosophy in Chinese civilization, the Communist Party of China has stayed committed to the abiding mission of serving the people wholeheartedly.” There was no transition from the emperor’s sacrifices to Heaven to the legitimacy of the Communist Party’s rule. In Xi’s telling, the party’s rein and the Mandate of Heaven were of the same origin.
Furthermore, Beijing’s diplomatic maneuvering is not merely about selecting venues, but about rewriting the historical significance of those venues domestically through external events to fit into its changing political agenda. Yingtai’s reform memories were overlaid with a unification narrative. The Forbidden City was transformed from a “Palace of Blood and Tears” (as it was viewed during the Mao era) into a “unique symbol of Chinese civilization” during the Xi era. The Temple of Heaven, once a space for imperial sacrifices, is reinterpreted as a symbol of “the Chinese worldview” – the political and theological meaning of worshipping Heaven is translated into cultural philosophy and its inheritance.
Each venue selection was accompanied by semantic cleansing: preserving the space’s grandeur, removing its political dangers, and injecting the narrative needed by the current regime. As Guang Yang recently analyzed in The Diplomat, Beijing excels at using word substitution to prepare discourse for policy shifts before or after the fact. The same logic applies to diplomatic spaces: the physical structure of the venue remains unchanged, but the historical significance it is allowed to carry is quietly replaced.
Diplomatic protocol is never merely protocol. The choice of venues 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 trajectory from the Great Hall of the People to the Temple of Heaven suggests that China’s choice of diplomatic settings is a materialized expression of its theory of state legitimacy, and thus it can be read, tracked, and predicted. Only by understanding this can we more accurately judge what Beijing intends to say next. What it wants to say includes, but is not limited to, the following three points:
First, the framework regarding Taiwan is changing. Under the revolutionary narrative, the Taiwan issue is about “liberation,” while under the narrative of a civilized empire, it’s 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 “Sinicization of religion” policy has become clearer. If the Communist Party’s legitimacy has shifted from “revolution” to “the secular successor to the Mandate of Heaven,” then it needs to 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 larger 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 “civilized empire,” changing Beijing’s sensitivity to external criticism. Regimes reliant on revolutionary narratives worry about ideological revisionism; regimes reliant on the international order depend on performance legitimacy. But what about regimes reliant on the narrative of a civilized empire? This is an issue that must be taken seriously and considered deeply.
