What Xi Jinping’s banquet seating chart said about China and America

Chinese social media spent much of last week mocking Xiaomi founder Lei Jun fanboying over Tesla’s Elon Musk at the state banquet for US President Donald Trump, as he sought a selfie for which the visibly bored Mr Musk grudgingly obliged, then proceeded to make a funny face.

But the more interesting story may have been the other people who were invited along with Mr Lei to mirror the formidable American business delegation that followed Mr Trump to Beijing on Air Force One.

Absent were some of China’s most recognisable tech titans like Alibaba’s Jack Ma, Tencent’s Pony Ma and Pinduoduo and Temu’s Colin Huang – the names that have come to represent China’s internet boom and technological rise.

If President Xi Jinping wanted the visit to project what he called a new phase of “constructive strategic stability” and “moderate competition” in US-China ties, the guest list had to match the tone. Companies like Huawei, DeepSeek and DJI – firms that have become lightning rods in US-China tensions – were never likely to feature prominently that evening.

Instead, Beijing assembled the industrialists, manufacturers and suppliers whose names may be less universally well known but whose businesses remain deeply plugged into the US economy.

Chinese supply chains

At one of the tables sat Madam Zhou Qunfei, founder of Lens Technology and one of China’s richest women, sandwiched between Apple CEO Tim Cook and Mr Musk – her two biggest customers.

Lens Technology is hardly a household name outside China, but millions of people touch its products every day without realising it. The company makes precision glass, touch panels and components used in smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and, increasingly, electric vehicles. Apple has long been one of its largest customers. Others include Samsung, Huawei, Meta, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, BYD and Tesla.

From a small watch-glass workshop started by Madam Zhou in Hunan in the 1990s, Lens has grown into a manufacturing giant employing over 140,000 workers across China and South-east Asia with multiple R&D and production bases.

Its scale reflects something the West often underestimates about China’s industrial ecosystem: the country is not merely assembling cheap products any more; it has spent years building highly specialised manufacturing capabilities that are extraordinarily difficult to replicate quickly anywhere else.

And that runs up against the assumption often embedded within Washington’s “de-risking” rhetoric – that supply chains can simply be reorganised at will.

Even as Washington pushes companies to diversify production into Vietnam, India or Mexico, many of those factories still depend on Chinese suppliers, Chinese tooling, Chinese engineers or Chinese intermediate components. China no longer sits just at the end of supply chains, but is embedded all through them.

Then, there was Mr Cao Hui of Fuyao Glass, seated to the right of Mr Musk.

Fuyao may be one of the most unintentionally symbolic Chinese companies operating in America. Its Ohio factory became the subject of the Oscar-winning 2019 documentary American Factory, which chronicled the cultural collisions that emerged after the Chinese company took over a shuttered General Motors plant in the Rust Belt.

The documentary was often framed as a story about globalisation, labour rights and clashing workplace cultures. But it also captured something larger: how deeply Chinese capital and US manufacturing had already become intertwined long before politicians began openly talking about economic separation.

Today, Fuyao supplies roughly a quarter of the automotive glass used in the US, and has invested more than US$1.5 billion (S$1.9 billion) across multiple American states, employing thousands of workers.

Across from them and next to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sat Mr Lu Weiding of Wanxiang Group, another company that has quietly built enormous stakes in the US industrial economy over decades.

Through Wanxiang America, the company supplies components to major US automakers like Ford, GM and Chrysler, and operates across dozens of American states. It also expanded into clean energy and electric vehicle technology after acquiring the bankrupt battery maker A123 Systems in 2013 and later plug-in hybrid maker Fisker Automotive’s assets.

Long before “friendshoring” became fashionable jargon in Washington, companies like Wanxiang were already woven into America’s industrial base.

For Beijing, these companies represent the ideal balance: globally successful Chinese firms that are deeply embedded overseas, while still strengthening China’s own industrial resilience.

But for the US, they complicate the simplistic narrative that economic decoupling is straightforward or even fully desirable.

Mutual dependence

At the aerospace table, sat executives from Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) and Air China alongside leaders from Boeing and GE Aerospace.

Soon after came Mr Trump’s announcement that China would order 200 Boeing aircraft, with the possibility of more later.

Again, the dependencies run both ways.

China urgently needs to renew and expand its commercial aviation fleet. Boeing needs Chinese orders after years of strained relations and regulatory freezes. Meanwhile, China’s own aviation champion, COMAC, still relies heavily on foreign technology, including engines supplied through CFM International, the GE Aerospace-Safran joint venture.

In 2025, Washington briefly suspended some engine exports to China amid escalating trade tensions. The episode was a reminder that despite Beijing’s ambitions for indigenous aviation capability, COMAC’s C919 still cannot fully fly without Western components.

But the converse is also true: Boeing needs China and cannot afford to lose it indefinitely to Airbus either.

This mutual dependence is probably more clear-cut in aviation than any other sectors.

Then, there were the consumer electronics and tech executives invited to the banquet. Alongside Lenovo’s Yang Yuanqing and ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo were executives from Hisense Group and Haier Group, both of which now derive substantial business from overseas markets including the US.

Haier, through its acquisition of GE Appliances in 2016, effectively became part of the American household appliance landscape itself. Hisense has spent years aggressively expanding in the US television and home electronics market, sponsoring sports tournaments and competing directly with South Korean and Japanese rivals on US shelves.

The banquet may also, intentionally or unintentionally, reveal something about how China now views its entrepreneurs.

A decade ago, China’s most famous tycoons like property mogul Wang Jianlin and Mr Jack Ma were often treated as celebrities in their own right – colourful, outspoken and occasionally unpredictable. Today, the mood is very different. Business leaders increasingly appear alongside the state, not apart from it. Their commercial success is folded into a broader story about national strength and industrial capability.

That might have been the message from that evening.

After years of tariffs, sanctions and threats of decoupling, the dinner ultimately served as a reminder that the US-China relationship still rests on something far more practical than ideology.

The political mood may have shifted dramatically, but the commercial interdependence built over the past three decades has proved far harder to dismantle.