Nothing about the summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump in Beijing suggested high drama. The language was restrained, the optics disciplined. The impression it left was simple: escalation of tensions for its own sake is a losing strategy.

The announcement that China would buy 200 Boeing aircraft served mainly as a political gesture of goodwill, with the commercial details to be filled in later by negotiators. More important was the pattern across readouts from Beijing and Washington, which emphasised staying in close touch, expanding channels of communication and lowering the emotional temperature after a long stretch of spiralling rhetoric.

At the heart of this reset is a phrase likely to define the next phase of the relationship: a “constructive” China-US relationship characterised by “strategic stability”. Xi introduced this framing at the summit, and Chinese media have since treated it as the new framework for ties with Washington.

But what made this visit more interesting was what aired on American television. With few concrete summit outcomes to report, US networks turned to the next-best raw material: the lives of ordinary Chinese people.

This matters because, for many Americans, China remains an abstraction. It is often portrayed as a composite of pollution, factories, authoritarianism, backwardness and threat. US media coverage did not abandon those tropes, but a more layered approach emerged as film crews went into communities, speaking to students, workers and small-business owners.

The students they met were just like those in many other countries. They admired American brands and artists such as Taylor Swift. Happiness, they said, meant career success and personal fulfilment.