Mao Ning's readout posted on X led with Taiwan. The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson's account carried the official Chinese version of the Trump-Xi summit's opening bilateral, and Xi's warning that mishandling of Taiwan "could send relations down a dangerous path" was the first substantive line. CBC's Reuters-sourced account summarized the Chinese readout: Taiwan was "the most important issue in U.S.-China relations" and improperly handled "could lead to conflict and an extremely dangerous situation." [1]

NBC News's live blog of the summit recorded a different hierarchy: Taiwan was absent from the White House readout. [2] The American version led with Iran items — Hormuz must remain open, no militarization, no toll, China to buy more US oil, Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. [3] One sentence Taiwan-centered, one sentence Iran-centered, two different documents.

The paper's May 13 brief said Iran sat at the top of the summit agenda for Washington. Today's brief confirms the corollary: Taiwan sat at the top of the summit agenda for Beijing. The asymmetry is the artifact. Each capital wrote the readout that served its own audience.

The Chinese readout's Taiwan-first construction also did diplomatic work that the American readout could not have done. Xi's language about the "dangerous path" gives Beijing the public posture of having extracted a Trump acknowledgment of the issue's severity. Trump's verbal track this week — patting Xi's arm, posing for photographs, calling the meeting "a 12 on a scale of 10" — does not contradict the Chinese readout. It also does not endorse it. The endorsement Trump did publish was the Iran paragraph, an item Mao Ning's account did not foreground.

Iran's position in the Chinese readout was procedural rather than substantive. Xinhua and Mao Ning summarized China's general view: an "exchange of views" on the situations in the Middle East, Ukraine, and the Korean peninsula. The strait toll language and the no-nuclear-weapon line that the American readout placed front-and-center did not get the same placement in Mao Ning's post. The two readouts are not directly contradictory; they are differently weighted. The same paragraph weight that Washington gave Iran, Beijing gave Taiwan.

Each capital's audience reads what its capital wanted read. That is what readouts are for. On Thursday the choice was visible.

-- DAVID CHEN, Beijing