Original Summary

EPA / President Trump said he and First Lady Melania helped design the statue US President Donald Trump has presented Chinese President Xi Jinping with a sculpture of a bald eagle, a bird native to North America and his country's national symbol, during a lavish state dinner in Washington. The gift, which was unveiled before VIP guests at the Thursday dinner, embodies "the free and soaring spirit of America", said Trump . He said that he and First Lady Melania Trump participated in its design. The statue is part of a valuable - but sometimes tricky - aspect of international diplomacy: gift-giving. Such gifts are a small but meaningful element of the larger aim of Xi and Trump's three-day summit – forging personal relationships between heads of two global superpowers. "They're going to discuss all of these complicated issues," Daniel Kritenbrink, partner at The Asia Group says. "But at the end of the day, these are still two human beings. "So that personal relationship means something," he says. "I think the gift exchange is one key part of that." Kritenbrink, who spent over 30 years as a US diplomat, mostly in Asia, says personal relationships are of particular importance to Xi. He believes the direct Trump-Xi bond is the glue that is holding together "the most complex and the most consequential relationship in the world". He says Trump, too, values what Kritenbrink calls "leader-level diplomacy". Gifts have had a unique presence in the Trump presidency. The US president has received a luxury jumbo jet, an engraved gold bar, a diamond-and-jewel encrusted gold ring, and more. Ole Jacob Sending from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs says: "You think about the Trump presidency in that way, I think gift giving, certainly broadly defined, is very much part of how he operates." On Thursday morning, Xi announced a gift of two Chinese pandas to a zoo in Atlanta - and a new student exchange programme, which will welcome 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. "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's unclear if he gave any further presents. The BBC has contacted the White House. Watch: The world’s two most powerful men just met. How did it go? Today, the practice of giving lavish gifts mostly exists in Gulf states and autocratic governments. "Autocracies like China give much more expensive gifts," says Morten Skumsrud Anderson, who co-authored a study on diplomacy and gifts with Sending. In the West, Anderson says, the tradition has been watered down by democratic guardrails and restrictions. For example, the US Constitution has an emoluments clause that puts a dollar-value limit on gifts a president can receive from a foreign government. Currently, the limit is $525 (£397). Anything higher and it 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. "There are a lot of rules and protocols involved," Sending says, "A lot of thought and process relating to what type of gift to 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," Sending says. Anderson adds: "This is not a last-minute purchase at the airport." During Xi's state visit to the US in 2013, then-President Barack Obama gifted him an inscribed bench made of redwood, native to California where the two had met. They sat on it together afterwards, smiling for cameras. It was a more shining example than in 2009, when then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown gifted Obama an ornamental desk pen holder made from the timbers of a historic anti-slave ship; while Obama gave Brown a set of DVDs, which reportedly were not formatted for UK DVD players. "That's one example of a kind of an embarrassing exchange," Sending says. Fortunately, Brown and Obama were allied leaders and not deep rivals looking to resolve seemingly intractable differences. "You don't want to mess up," Sending says, adding that the wrong gift could potentially derail any larger objectives. In this case, there is potentially a lot at stake between Trump and Xi. Their third face-to-face encounter since the start of Trump's second term, this summit is happening amid growing fears of an AI-led apocalypse as both countries race for dominance in the quickly growing industry. It's also taking place in the wake of a bitter US-China trade war that has only been resolved by a temporary truce, extended on this trip. So, do the military plane flyovers, cue the performances, fill the wine the glasses, Kritenbrink says. Exchange the gifts. "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," Kritenbrink says. "I'll take a fragile truce over a white-hot trade war any day of the week." Trump welcomes Xi for State Dinner

中文概览

中文标题： 特朗普为何在国宴上向习近平赠送华丽白头海雕雕像

特朗普在华盛顿国宴上向习近平赠送白头海雕雕塑，称其体现美国自由翱翔精神，并参与设计。文章讨论领导人外交中的赠礼：习近平宣布向亚特兰大动物园赠送两只大熊猫及五年内欢迎10万美国学生赴华交流项目；分析人士称礼物交换有助于建立个人关系，并提及美国对总统收礼有金额限制，超过525美元归联邦财产。

  • 情报分类：综合情报
  • 分类依据：外交赠礼与领导人会晤，不属技术等类别，归综合情报
  • 信息来源：英语新闻 / BBC News Top Stories
  • 发布时间：2026/9/25 11:00:03