McDonald’s served to US delegation as Trump and Xi dine formally

McDonald’s became the visual shorthand for the Beijing summit’s split screen: inside Zhongnanhai, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping sat down for a private tea meeting and an elaborate working lunch, while White House staff, U.S. Embassy aides and the traveling press pool were reportedly given McDonald’s outside the heavily guarded compound.

The contrast landed because the leaders’ table looked more like statecraft than fast-food theater. The menu for Trump and Xi was described as unusually formal and multi-course, with minced codfish in seafood soup, crispy stir-fried lobster balls, pan-seared beef fillet stuffed with morel mushrooms, kung pao chicken with scallops, braised seasonal vegetables, steamed pork and shrimp dumplings, stewed beef in a bun, then dessert, coffee and tea. Other reporting described a banquet with lobster in tomato soup, crispy beef ribs, Beijing roast duck, slow-cooked salmon in mustard sauce and pan-fried pork bun.

For McDonald’s workers, the image is less about novelty than brand symbolism. The chain is one of the few American names that can function as a political prop, a punchline and a cultural marker at the same time. It also shows how much of McDonald’s public identity is built far above the counter, even though the company’s day-to-day reality depends on crew members, shift managers and franchise operators who live with speed targets, thin margins, wage pressure and constant scrutiny.

That tension is familiar in the United States, where McDonald’s has long been tied to Fight for $15 campaigns, minimum wage fights and the debate over whether automation will replace front-line work or simply reshape it. The Beijing image underscored the brand’s global reach, but it also highlighted the gap between the logo’s power and the labor that keeps it moving, whether the meal is behind a drive-thru window or outside a political fortress.

Trump and Xi’s meeting took place during a two-day Beijing summit centered at Zhongnanhai, the political nerve center of China’s Communist leadership. It was Trump’s first state visit to China since 2017. The trip ended without major breakthroughs on trade, Taiwan or the Iran war, even as Trump called it “incredible” and both sides claimed progress. In that sense, the McDonald’s meal was not the point. It was the symbol that made the whole tableau instantly legible.