A lot’s changed since Xi Jinping’s last US state visit. Mostly in China’s favor

When Chinese leader Xi Jinping visits Washington this week, he will be sitting down with President Donald Trump in a vastly different position than the last time the two men met face-to-face in the United States nearly a decade ago.

At that 2017 summit at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort China was lagging America on multiple fronts and vulnerable to the tech and trade frictions Trump would unleash on it in the coming year.

Now, Xi arrives at the helm of a country that’s transformed. The world’s second largest economy has emerged as a tech heavyweight. Home-grown tech talent is spurring Chinese AI models ever closer to Silicon Valley’s frontier. Beijing-based space firms are launching and landing reuseable rockets with their sights on global champion SpaceX. Companies from energy to AI, robots and memory chips have launched blockbuster stock debuts over the past year.

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