Trump presents Xi with bald eagle sculpture at White House state dinner

Xi announces two pandas for Atlanta Zoo and US student exchange program

President Donald Trump presented Chinese President Xi Jinping with a sculpture of a bald eagle during a lavish White House state dinner on Thursday, saying the gift embodied “the free and soaring spirit of America.” Trump said he and First Lady Melania Trump participated in designing the statue. The bald eagle is native to North America and is the United States’ national symbol.

Ahead of the dinner, Xi announced gifts of his own: two Chinese giant pandas — named Ping Ping and Fu Shuang — would travel to Zoo Atlanta, and a new student exchange program would bring 100,000 US students to study in China over five years. “The giant panda have been an envoy of friendship between the Chinese and the Americans,” Xi said, according to BBC News reporting. “In a few days, two pandas — Ping Ping and Fu Shuang — will come to their new home in Zoo Atlanta and meet with the American people.” It was unclear whether Xi presented any further gifts to Trump; the BBC reported it had contacted the White House for details.

Daniel Kritenbrink, a partner at The Asia Group who spent over 30 years as a US diplomat mostly in Asia, said gift exchanges are a small but meaningful element of the larger aim of the three-day summit — forging personal relationships between the two heads of state. “They’re going to discuss all of these complicated issues,” Kritenbrink said. “But at the end of the day, these are still two human beings. So that personal relationship means something. I think the gift exchange is one key part of that.” Kritenbrink said personal relationships are of particular importance to Xi, and he said Trump, too, values what Kritenbrink calls “leader-level diplomacy.” Kritenbrink described the direct Trump-Xi bond as the glue holding together “the most complex and the most consequential relationship in the world.”

Ole Jacob Sending, a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, said gift giving is woven into how Trump operates. “You think about the Trump presidency in that way, I think gift giving, certainly broadly defined, is very much part of how he operates,” Sending said. According to BBC News reporting, Trump has previously received a luxury jumbo jet, an engraved gold bar, and a diamond-and-jewel encrusted gold ring, among other gifts.

Morten Skumsrud Andersen, who co-authored a study on diplomacy and gifts with Sending, said the practice of giving lavish gifts today mostly persists in Gulf states and autocratic governments. “Autocracies like China give much more expensive gifts,” Andersen said. In the West, he said, the tradition has been watered down by democratic guardrails and restrictions. The US Constitution’s emoluments clause caps the dollar value of gifts a president may accept from a foreign government; the current limit is $525. Anything above that becomes federal property unless the president chooses to buy it back with his own money. Also, when giving a gift beyond a certain amount, a US president would have to go through Congress, unless he was paying for it personally.

Sending said gift exchanges between heads of state are highly scripted and negotiated well in advance. “There are a lot of rules and protocols involved,” Sending said. “A lot of thought and process relating to what type of gift to give, where should the gift exchange happen? How should it happen? When? All of this is highly scripted, and involves negotiation at lower levels that goes on for weeks and weeks in advance.” Andersen added: “This is not a last-minute purchase at the airport.”

Past presidential gift exchanges have produced both successes and stumbles. During Xi’s state visit to the United States in 2013, then-President Barack Obama gifted him an inscribed bench made of California redwood, where the two had met; they sat on it together afterwards for photographers. In 2009, then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave Obama an ornamental desk pen holder made from the timbers of a historic anti-slave ship; Obama returned a set of DVDs that reportedly were not formatted for UK players. Sending called the Brown-Obama exchange “one example of a kind of an embarrassing exchange,” adding that the wrong gift could derail larger diplomatic aims. “Fortunately, Brown and Obama were allied leaders and not deep rivals looking to resolve seemingly intractable differences,” Sending said.

The state visit marks Trump’s third face-to-face meeting with Xi since the start of his second term. The summit is happening amid growing fears of an AI-led apocalypse as both countries race for dominance in the quickly growing industry, and in the wake of a bitter US-China trade war that has only been resolved by a temporary truce extended during the trip. “In this case, there is potentially a lot at stake between Trump and Xi,” Sending said. Kritenbrink said the present exchange helps smooth over the differences and should be seen in the same way as the military flyovers, the pageantry and the state dinner. “It’s protocol and it’s optics and it’s gift giving all as a means to an end, which is stable US-China relations,” he said. “I’ll take a fragile truce over a white-hot trade war any day of the week.”