Cheering children - check. Military honour guard – check. Cannon fire and marching band - check.
Vladimir Putin's welcome outside the Great Hall of the People was a near mirror image of the reception for Donald Trump last week.
Two high-stakes presidential visits, just days apart, is exactly the image Xi Jinping wants to project to the world: talking to everyone, tied to no-one.
For China, these visits are proof that because of its massive economy and newfound diplomatic clout all roads now lead to Beijing.
The new era of world affairs is less centered around the West, says Samir Puri from Kings College London.
There is a lot of latent power that China has on the world stage, it's not necessarily using it in its most direct form to settle conflicts, instead China's style is to try to utilize its stature in a more gradual sense.
The optics were strikingly similar - Xi confident in the spotlight as he played host. But the politics driving the two visits were very different.
Putin appears to have a close personal relationship with Xi, but the war in Ukraine and Western sanctions have left him leaning heavily on Beijing, which is now Russia's top trading partner and its biggest customer for oil and gas.
It has been an unequal partnership for some time now. Talks ended with 20-plus agreements on trade and tech, but no approval yet for the stalled Russian gas pipeline that Putin has been pushing for years. A lengthy joint statement also yielded no major breakthroughs.
Both China and Russia need each other, but Russia clearly needs China more than before at the global stage, says Dr Zheng Runyu, from the Centre for Russian Studies at the East China Normal University in Shanghai.
Given today's international environment, deep co-operation with China is extremely important for Russia in dealing with many of its current challenges.
The Chinese leader appeared strong negotiating with both Trump and Putin. Stronger trade relationships with the rest of the world and China's dominance in rare earth minerals and advanced manufacturing have given him leverage, positioning Beijing on an equal footing with Washington, especially with Trump’s unpredictability.
And in talks with both leaders, Xi faced leaders mired in costly wars that have dragged on for longer than they anticipated. For Trump, the war in the Middle East spirals as a global crisis impacting his approval ratings. For Putin, the invasion of Ukraine has isolated Russia and taken a brutal toll on its people.
In both cases, it becomes clear that now China has the power to set the tone and terms of how it wants to engage on the global stage. Despite this, Xi's diplomatic finesse reveals the limitations of China's power.
This recent week marked a remarkable turnaround for a country that appeared close to diplomatic isolation just five years ago, managing to transition from being a problem to contain into an indispensable power for engagement. However, its authoritarian nature and controversial governance continue to challenge the trust it seeks on the global stage.
