Our beloved China, the new social-political-economic butterfly on the scene, wowed at APEC before jetting off for the ASEAN East Asia Summit and the G20 Summit.

Hosting APEC for the first time since 2011, Beijing did things 大气, spending $6 billion on a lakeside campus, a new elevated expressway, and a no-costs-spared spectacular opening complete with fireworks. But how did they really do?

Silk Road: A Mod Look

The leader of the world’s largest economy kicked off the event with a bold statement, boasting a $40 billion price tag for the revival of an old classic: the Silk Road trade route. The fund’s goal is to “break the connectivity bottleneck” in Asia, focusing on connecting nations Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, Pakistan and Tajikistan. The Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will be set up as the major mechanism for funding infrastructure development. Oh, you got your own development bank now, huh? Xi, you so smoov.

Diplomacy + Drama = Dipl-o-rama!  

With 21 of the hottest Pacific Rim economies mingling to promote free trade and economic cooperation throughout the region, dangran there was a bit of drama! Analysts and amateurs alike gossiped over…

…bad boy Putin’s interaction with errbody. Hot topics included Russia’s invasion of Crimea, its poking at ailing eastern Ukraine, that time it shot down MH17… oh, and did you see Putin hitting on the missus, Lady Peng Liyuan?? Omg, I bet he was like, “here you can take my shirt, too.”

…APEC Blue: The color of this season. You gotta spend money to make money, and apparently you make money by turning the sky blue again for the economic giants of the world. For a costly hiatus, Beijing took half of the cars off local roads, closed more than 1,000 heavy industrial plants, and delayed central heating services in Tianjin.

…Japan’s Shinzo Abe and Xi Jinping breaking their “cold spell” of chilly diplomatic relations with a SUPER awkward handshake. #theresthebeef

…shirt-frontin’! With this type of posturing, why not flatter your figure(head) with a Star Trek-inspired tunic! Shiny yet understated, the APEC uniform even included a communicator-esque badge. I myself am thoroughly delighted that we’re evolving into The Next Generation.

Kinda a Big Deal in Asia

After the pomp and circumstance, the press junket did graduate to a body of bilateral negotiations. What was kinda a big deal?

ITA: a U.S.-Sino commitment to eliminating tariffs on such items as computers and computer software, telecommunication equipment and other advanced technology products.

Climate: a U.S.-Sino pact to reduce emissions, which emerged from seeming nothingness

Visas: a U.S.-Sino pact (seeing any patterns?) allowing Chinese visas for 10-year American tourists/businessmen and 5-year students. The application process for which I’m assuming is proportionately long, and will be subject to change NOW.

Putin’s not just keeping Xi’s wife warm – an agreement for 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas pipelined in from Western Siberian deposits to China should keep China toasty for 30 years.

FTAs, he-eeyy: South Korea and Australia are #winning. Tony Abbott is besides himself, apparent in a 30-second handshake during which it was unclear how much Xi Jinping was listening.

For more APEC goodies, read on! Links you’ll l-o-v-e <3:

- Tony Abbott shook hands with Xi FOREVER at APEC. You should know why.

- A throwback article to Xi’s call for a “regional security architecture” at CICA.

- Popup Chinese’s Sinica podcast, again with their finger on the pulse.

I love this GIF.

This was President Barack Obama’s reaction to Xi Jinping stonewalling New York Times reporter Mark Landler, and it captures — in two inches of movement, half a second, a tilt of an eyebrow — so many of our feelings about Chinese politics and journalism: yeah, it’s opaque and dreary and venal and debasing to common intellect, but what are ya gonna to do? Eh? Not like revolution has historically been any better, so best to leave em to their devices. Or as New York Times reported:

“The Chinese say, ‘let he who tied the bell on the tiger take it off,’ ” Mr. Xi added, in a somewhat enigmatic phrase that was not immediately translated into English. It is normally interpreted as “the party which has created the problem should be the one to help resolve it.”

But man, that shrug — a shrug without budging the shoulder, a shrug that belongs on the Mount Rushmore of shrugs, a ladleful of amazing, pure poetry of body movement, what Chinese politicians can’t begin dreaming of attaining because that would require they sleep, because then we’d have evidence they were human beings, humans able to express basic bafflement, irony, lighthearted acquiescence – that shrug is a fucking mynx.

ABC News has a video of the above: basically, Xi Jinping’s central processor shutting down before our eyes as he removes his earpiece and turns toward the obsequious Chinese media while others in the press corps chuckle at his face with tactful viciousness.

Outside of all the obvious things we can say about this, I’ll humbly submit: it wasn’t even a hard question. Landler, possibly understanding he wouldn’t get a response anyway, asked about visas. Not censorship, Hong Kong, or human rights… just journalist visas, which was apropos considering the US just relaxed its visa policy (10-year visas now available to Chinese travelers).

But Xi – adhering to his weeklong, surely deliberate (and deliberated upon) strategy of staying as aloof as possible, like a 13-year-old hipster at a family picnic, way too cool for those gauche monkey bars – gave his best sulk-and-simper, mope-and-dope, and pressed his “system restart” button. You can easily envision the look without seeing it, how it begins in the eyes, the frumpy old ayi of his soul throwing close those windows and loudly latching them from the inside, muttering under her breath a curse of the self-imposed prison to which she owns the keys; how it spreads, like the widening radius of an infestation, into his brows and cheekbones, causing skin to sag with the weight of profound understanding and grievous regret that life exists and living things live; followed by, finally, a resigned acceptance that the adult world outside his magic fort abides by a set of conventions set through human concert, human strain and effort; oh what the crippled heart will never know; how our eye level can seem like a mountain’s peak to the quadriplegic. We know the look too well.

How fortunate, then, that the cameras focused on Obama, and that reaction, and that GIF. Goddamn I love it to bits.