U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping recently met in San Francisco, marking their first in-person meeting in more than a year. After years of rising U.S.-China tensions, expectations for the meeting were understandably low.

Straight Arrow News contributor Larry Lindsey examined Chinese domestic media coverage of the meeting to identify the hopes, expectations and perceptions of the Chinese public regarding the events in San Francisco. Lindsey concludes that Chinese domestic coverage was overly favorable and propagandistic, yet also very plausible, and that Chinese writers ultimately noted a number of sound arguments and observations.

President Biden and General Secretary Xi Jinping had their first meeting in a year in San Francisco. Expectations were low. The U.S. media basically said it was a snooze. Or, as Winston Churchill said, it’s still a good thing, “It’s better to jaw jaw than to wah wah.” Using Churchill’s accent, it rhymes.

Well, the Chinese media had a different take. They called what happened the creation of “the San Francisco vision.” They said this summit is a strategic and far-reaching meeting, leaving a profound mark in the history of U.S.-China relations. Well, of course they’re going to tell that to their own people, because they’re trying to make Jinping look good. Okay. So, certainly their reaction was propaganda. But it was not totally implausible propaganda. I think that looking at it, they had three good points.

First, Xi established China as America’s equal in the world. Now consider Xi’s line that was repeated over and over again: “The world is big enough to accommodate both our countries.” Fair enough. How about everyone else, like the Philippines, which is having its navy ships and fishing boats rammed by the Chinese navy all the time, or the other nations that border on the South China Sea, which China is trying to claim in its entirety, right up to the three-mile limit of the other countries, or Japan, which [has] had interdictions between planes of their two air forces? So Xi, what he was trying to do with [this] line is not trying to say peace, but saying, “Hey, it’s really just the two of us. We’re all that matter.“