Mao Zedong left China as top leader exactly twice, both times for Moscow. Deng Xiaoping managed five countries on three trips. Xi Jinping, by contrast, has now visited 71 countries on more than 50 trips abroad, and his meeting with Donald Trump in Washington will be his seventh trip to the United States as head of state. It will also make him the only Chinese president to make two state visits to the American capital.
That was the picture Andrew Scobell of the think tank MERICS painted on the eve of the summit, the second between the two men in four months. His argument is that Xi is at the peak of his powers of summitry, and that “head-of-state diplomacy” is a job he has remade in his own image.
More travel, more pageantry
Scobell notes that the presidency only became a post of real diplomatic weight in the mid-1990s, when China’s top leader began holding the party, state and military posts at the same time. Jiang Zemin started serious head-of-state diplomacy, and Hu Jintao carried it on. Xi has pushed it further since 2013. Jiang visited 71 countries on 39 trips; Hu went to 69 countries on 50. Xi is on course to pass Jiang’s record.
His travel has thinned out lately, though, in step with troubles at home and strained ties abroad. Scobell says Xi picks his trips carefully. The annual Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit and the BRICS gathering, held this year in India, seem obligatory. A visit to Egypt was timed to the 70th anniversary of ties with China’s oldest Middle Eastern diplomatic partner. Xi avoids places where a visit might invite awkward official talks or angry crowds. His 2024 European tour took in Hungary and Serbia, both friendly to Beijing, and France, whose president was working hard to court him.
The home advantage
Xi has also hosted more foreign leaders than any predecessor, and since the pandemic he has put more effort into it. At home, the Communist Party can script every detail from the moment a visitor lands. In 2017 Trump became the first foreign leader in modern times to dine in the Forbidden City.
The payoff, Scobell argues, is political as much as diplomatic. Photo opportunities lift Xi’s standing at home and bolster the party’s legitimacy, partly through the SCO and BRICS forums, which put China at the centre. Peng Liyuan has joined him abroad far more than any earlier Chinese first lady. In 2026 she went with him to North Korea and Egypt, and she was due to accompany him to Washington.
Behind Xi stands what Scobell calls the most capable and professional corps of career diplomats China has had since 1949. He contrasts it with a US State Department that is below strength and a foreign policy under Trump that he describes as erratic.
