Last week, on the anniversary of his election victory, Donald Trump touched down in Beijing for a state visit. As a candidate, Trump talked tough on China, describing it as an economic enemy and declaring, at one point, that “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country.” As President, he has softened that rhetoric. “Who can blame a country for taking advantage of another country for the benefit of its own citizens?” Trump said on Thursday, while speaking to a crowd of business executives in the Great Hall of the People. “I give China great credit.”

Since Richard Nixon’s ice-breaking visit to Beijing, in 1972, the People’s Republic of China has viewed the United States through the prism of the Presidency. China’s leaders—and its citizens, too—regard the institution with wary esteem and occasional incomprehension. Nixon made his visit over objections from Congress, the State Department, the military, regional allies, and the Soviet Union. Two years later, when Nixon found himself swamped by Watergate and under attack in Congress, Mao Zedong responded with bafflement. “Too much freedom of expression,” the Chairman said.

Any Presidential visit to China comes with a risk for the hosts. U.S. Presidents, historically, have been prone to raising the plight of dissidents, and making other unwelcome gestures toward liberal democracy. For China’s government and official media, managing Presidential visits has meant tipping the weight of the American Presidency away from discussions of values and toward realpolitik interests. By tradition, the President’s travel planners, with direction from the Oval Office, push back. In 2005, George W. Bush attended a Sunday church service in Beijing. “My hope is that the government of China will not fear Christians who gather to worship openly,” he said. In 2009, during Barack Obama’s first visit to China—at a time when his Administration was seeking Chinese coöperation on climate change, Iran, and North Korea—he nonetheless held an open town-hall forum with Chinese students in Shanghai. (Obama and his staff were embarrassed when the questioners turned out to be pre-screened and coverage of the event was smothered by censorship.) In 2014, Obama demanded a joint press conference with President Xi Jinping. The Times, given the rare opportunity to question a Chinese leader in an unscripted setting, asked Xi about China’s refusal to grant visas to news organizations whose reporting offended the Chinese leadership.

The Chinese media, meanwhile, operates as a buffer during these visits, ready to airbrush or explain away inharmonious remarks and rebut arguments. State-run newspapers prepare editorials defending China as a developing country with its own civilization and mores, unsuited to “Western”-style human rights. Discussing “universal values,” they imply, is an imperialist conspiracy to humiliate China. Every issue is turned to bolster the political primacy of the Communist Party.

This defensive posture was not necessary during Trump’s visit last week. The censors may have braced for an errant tweet about the trade deficit, or North Korea, but none seemed anxious that Trump would raise the case of Liu Xia, the widow of the Nobel Prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo, who has been detained incommunicado, without charges, since her husband’s death in detention, in July. State media covered Trump with an eerie bonhomie. During a military march put on in Tiananmen Square for Trump’s visit, a state-television anchor hailed the schoolchildren who had turned out to cheer Te-lang-pu Yeye—Grandpa Trump. In state media, such an avuncular title is unconventional for a foreign leader, as it conveys a forbearing kind of affection. Trump, apparently oblivious to all this, drank in the pomp and flattery at the parade.

Trump is surprisingly popular among the Chinese public. They recognize his posture as a clan patriarch, with many children by multiple wives, who blends family and business into politics. His brash artifice, transactional worldview, and blood-and-soil nativism are all familiar archetypes in China, whose own gilded economic boom has bolstered nationalist pride and a renewed interest in the roots of Chinese civilization. Like their leaders, average Chinese citizens view America ambivalently, with a blend of admiration, envy, and disdain. America’s companies, universities, and military are considered world-class, yet the U.S. is also known as a land of mass shootings, racial strife, and callow capitalism. Trump’s election neatly fit the Chinese-propaganda narrative that American democracy, while it may have had its moment, is a fluke, and will ultimately end in corruption and dysfunction.

Trump’s cynical remark in the Great Hall of the People—“who can blame a country for taking advantage of another country?”—confirmed the Chinese view of him as a misguided yet unthreatening figure. The Global Times, the xenophobic id of China’s ruling élites, ran an editorial offering a polite rejoinder to the comment, dropping its customary Breitbart-esque tone in favor of gentle chiding. “His castigating of China has softened greatly in comparison to what he said before,” the editorial said. “But, in fact, China has not ‘taken advantage of America’; China does not have the ability to selfishly control the global trade system. China does not make global trade rules, and can’t enforce its agenda over global trade.”

In 1971, while negotiating Nixon’s trip to China, Henry Kissinger—a disciple of realpolitik—understood that publicly advancing American values would serve American interests. He fought with his negotiating counterpart, Premier Zhou Enlai, for control of protocols and political stagecraft that would project the prestige and the moral force of the Presidency. “We recognize that the People’s Republic does not trade in principles,” Kissinger told Zhou. “Neither do we.” Since those years, the job of the Chinese state media during Presidential visits has been to subtly undercut the visiting American leader’s efforts to project the moral power of his office. Last week, Trump made the job easier.