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In the eyes of President Donald Trump, Washington is a "filthy" "death trap" of a city in desperate need of a new ballroom and a giant triumphal arch. On Wednesday, he arrived in Beijing - a capital reenvisioned as a living showcase of China's ambitions to dominate industries of the future.
Digital billboards advertising Chinese large language models like DeepSeek and Qwen blink throughout the city. Electric vehicles, a growing number of them driverless, cruise quietly through the streets. Humanoid robots and robot dogs, all available for sale, perform for customers on the retail floor of luxury malls.
Solar panels cover the rooftops of apartment buildings; wind turbines - an object of particular disdain for the U.S. president - rise from the mountain ridges surrounding Beijing.
Since Trump last visited in 2017, Beijing has undergone a cutting edge makeover. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus reportedly said: No man ever steps in the same river twice, "for it is not the same river and he is not the same man." Trump is hardly the same leader he was nine years ago. And Beijing is hardly the same city.
As Trump meets with President Xi Jinping to discuss trade, investment and artificial intelligence, the city's tech-laden urban landscape will serve as a powerful backdrop for the image of confidence and advancement that the Chinese leadership wants to project not just to the visiting American delegation but to the rest of the world, said Sarah Beran, a partner at Macro Advisory Partners who served as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing during the Biden administration.
Not only does China intend to dominate sectors like AI and robotics, it wants to do so without relying on rivals, as the United States relies on China for rare earth minerals, analysts say.
With Trump and his entourage in town, carefully arranged set pieces will conceal the stubborn challenges dogging China's economy, such as youth unemployment, as well as the country's lingering reliance on certain U.S. technology like advanced computer chips, Beran said.
Instead, Chinese leaders will seek to ensure images beamed to screens from Brussels to Singapore portray Beijing as a futuristic city at the helm of a surging economy that has recovered from "zero-covid" lockdowns and a prolonged slump in its property sector.
Footage of Beijing will look to tell the story that China is "back on its feet" and that other governments need to find a way to work with the country or risk being left behind, Beran said.
"These images are the real deliverable for Beijing. That's what the leadership wants out of this visit," she added. "In this sense, from Beijing's perspective, it will likely be a very successful visit."
As they venture into the city on Thursday, the large American delegation will discover an environment that has become "much more visibly technological" than in 2017, said Poe Zhao, a Beijing-based China tech analyst and founder of the newsletter Hello China Tech.
Homegrown Chinese tech prowess "is no longer confined to office parks or trade shows," Zhao said. "It is increasingly part of the city's surface."
The air quality is improved and streets are less noisy because hundreds of thousands of combustion engine cars have been replaced with electric vehicles, most manufactured domestically and bearing the logos of Chinese brands like BYD and Nio.
A growing number of vehicles are driverless - part of China's fleet of autonomous robotaxis, which have begun to outpace U.S. competitors in regions like the Middle East and Southeast Asia. One Chinese company, WeRide, carries out testing on Beijing's roads after nightfall, training vehicles to navigate low-light conditions.
In the city center, prime real estate is occupied by companies selling AI-related services and products. On Wangfujing, a luxury shopping street, what used to be a jewelry store is now a retail space for Unitree Robotics, a Chinese company that has become the world's biggest humanoid robot maker - and a threat, according to U.S. lawmakers, to U.S. national security.
East of downtown, other robots practice taking care of the elderly while still others manufacture precision parts in a 10,000-square foot training center. Last month, in another neighborhood, China staged a robot half-marathon.
Woven into Beijing's landscape is China's newfound assuredness in its ability to level with the U.S., said Wang Huiyao, a former government policy adviser and president of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based think tank.
During the first Trump administration, China was "on the receiving end" of U.S. sanctions and tariffs, Wang said. "Now is different because China can counter," he added. "We have achieved a mutually assured deterrence of some kind."
The Chinese government unleashed a series of export controls over the last year, most notably on rare earths. In recent weeks, Chinese authorities also invoked a 2021 "blocking rule" for the first time to defy U.S. sanctions on Chinese oil refineries. And the authorities ordered the unwinding of Meta's acquisition of an AI firm with Chinese roots - a bold step even as it remains unclear how it will be enforced.
Across a range of technologies, analysts agree China is increasingly able not only to match but at times surpass the U.S. In a report released this week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned that China's industrial strategy was becoming "more systemic and pervasive, extending across all layers of production from upstream inputs and industrial equipment to downstream applications, services, and frontier technologies."
During Trump's Beijing visit, a highly choreographed experience scheduled to last little more than 36 hours, the U.S. delegation - and by extension, the rest of the world - will see only "what the Chinese side wants them to see," Beran said.
It is, however, an incomplete picture.
On the outskirts of Beijing, just slightly farther southeast of the high-tech logistics hub of Yizhuang, sits one of northern China's largest informal labor markets, called Majuqiao.
Every morning before daybreak, hundreds of workers stream from congested dormitories into the market to jostle for day jobs, a symptom of a wider unemployment problem that is especially acute among the young. About 17 percent of people aged 16 to 24 are jobless, according to official figures.
In April, a Beijing magazine called Sanlian Life Weekly released a video report showing delivery drivers in the city struggling with plunging rates, longer hours and stiffer competition. "Technology that should liberate human labor is instead trapping delivery workers in longer working hours without significantly improving their income," the magazine wrote.
Shortly after going viral across Chinese social media platforms, the video was deleted by its publisher. No explanation was provided.
(COMMENT, BELOW)