{"id":671362,"date":"2026-05-14T23:13:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T23:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/671362\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T23:13:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T23:13:09","slug":"photo-of-us-china-delegation-criticized-over-absence-of-women-masculine-militarized-and-exclusionary-world-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/671362\/","title":{"rendered":"Photo of US-China delegation criticized over absence of women: \u2018masculine, militarized and exclusionary\u2019 | World news"},"content":{"rendered":"

By the time Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met at Beijing\u2019s Great Hall of the People on Thursday, the bilateral had featured all the expected pomp and pageantry: a meticulously choreographed display of Chinese soldiers, children waving American and Chinese flags, and rows of senior officials and the US\u2019s top business executives.<\/p>\n

Conspicuously absent at the table, however, were women from either delegation \u2013 a stark visual that quickly drew criticism from observers who saw it as an unmistakable display of patriarchal power.<\/p>\n

In a tweet that has attracted over 22,000 likes overnight, Gita Gopinath, an economics professor at Harvard University, wrote<\/a>: \u201cA painting of the end of meritocracy: A meeting of the two largest economies and not one woman at the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking to the Guardian, Gopinath elaborated on her comments, saying: \u201cWe have somehow gravitated back to this idea that what matters is your network and not your capabilities \u2013 and that matters [in terms of] whether or not you get a seat at the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

She added: \u201cIt\u2019s just inexplicable how you end up with a single-gender table, given the many talented women around the world.<\/p>\n

Halima Kazem, associate director for Stanford University\u2019s program in feminist, gender and sexuality studies, echoed similar sentiments.<\/p>\n

Comparing Thursday\u2019s images to bilateral meetings during Barack Obama\u2019s presidency, Kazem said: \u201cWe\u2019ve gone backward. Obama-era US-China summits included women at the table. Now neither superpower thinks women belong in the room where great power politics happens. This isn\u2019t just American failure \u2013 it\u2019s a bilateral signal that women\u2019s voices don\u2019t matter in shaping the global order.\u201d<\/p>\n

China\u2019s President Xi Jinping speaks during a bilateral meeting with Barack Obama in Washington DC in March 2016. Photograph: Mandel Ngan\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Women seated at previous US-China bilateral meetings during Obama\u2019s presidency included Liu Yandong, China\u2019s then vice-premier, as well as Susan Rice, US national security adviser, and Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state.<\/p>\n

Kazem pointed to the type of power being ostensibly signaled by both sides, saying: \u201cThis wasn\u2019t about lack of qualified women \u2013 both countries have plenty in their diplomatic and security establishments. This was a choice about what kind of authority to project: masculine, militarized, and exclusionary.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen both superpowers perform power this way, they\u2019re jointly defining what \u2018serious\u2019 diplomacy looks like and who gets excluded from it,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

Despite the absence of women at Thursday\u2019s bilateral meeting in the Great Hall of the People, a small handful of women did accompany Trump on his two-day visit to Beijing, including Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, as well as Jane Fraser, the Citigroup CEO, and Dina Powell McCormick, the Meta president.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By the time Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met at Beijing\u2019s Great Hall of the People on Thursday,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671363,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-671362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}