Foreign Policy published its reading of what Xi Jinping really thinks of Donald Trump on 28 September, three days after the Washington summit closed. The piece asks the right question. The answer sits in what Beijing carried home, or, more precisely, in what it did not.

The summit produced no agreement. Xi's demand that the United States oppose Taiwan independence went unanswered. That is the whole of the deliverable side, and any reading of Xi's view has to start from an entry that reads zero.

The counterparty entries are the ones that did move. The People's Liberation Army conducted joint naval and air drills around Scarborough Shoal within days, after a standoff with the Philippines, as The Diplomat and TVB News both reported. Ambassador David Perdue has since said Trump asked Xi whether China wanted to buy US weapons while the two discussed the planned Taiwan arms sales.

Read together, the entries give a Chinese leader who came for a Taiwan commitment, received a question about a catalogue, and went home to a military that kept its own calendar. A ledger like that supports a view of the counterparty as transactional, and it supports nothing warmer.

Foreign Policy's title promises Xi's private assessment. The public record supplies only the account book. The Taiwan demand stays open, and until Washington answers it, the summit's only balance is the one Xi carried out unchanged.