President Trump showed off some of the construction that he’s had done at the White House to President Xi Jinping of China during their summit on Thursday, and Mr. Trump had reasons to want the Chinese leader’s nod of approval.
Throughout the uproar over Mr. Trump’s demolition of the East Wing and construction of a grandiose ballroom on the site, the American president has repeatedly cited the Great Hall of the People in China as inspiration and competition with his own design.
On the first full day of Mr. Xi’s visit, Mr. Trump gave him a brief tour of the ballroom construction site, as well as the helipad project that was officially opened this week. Mr. Trump called the Chinese leader “an expert on stone” who “loves good granite” as Mr. Xi stood by without changing his expression.
The Great Hall looms over Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, and it hosts the annual meeting of China’s Communist Party-run legislature. Chinese leaders also meet visiting foreign leaders in its halls, including Mr. Trump in May and in 2017.
On that visit in May, members of Mr. Trump’s delegation, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, marveled at the size and splendor of the Great Hall. They were echoing Mr. Trump’s own admiration for the building, which covers over 1.8 million square feet across four levels, and its central auditorium can seat about 10,000 people. (Mr. Trump’s planned ballroom covers 90,000 square feet.)
“So we’re building something that’s going to be the most beautiful anywhere in the world,” Mr. Trump said at a Republican midterm convention in Dallas earlier this month. “When I was in China, they have a building — it’s called the Great Hall of China. It’s a serious hall. This is a very large hall, but we’re going to top it, you know?”
Mr. Trump has described his admiration for the Great Hall on at least six occasions in recent months, according to a review of his speeches and news conferences. “They have a very large ballroom, beautiful ballroom,” Mr. Trump said in the Rose Garden of the White House in July. “We don’t have that, but we’re going to have one that tops everything.”
The grandeur of the Great Hall reflected the ambitions of Mao Zedong, the autocratic leader who ordered its construction. China “must build a grand hall that can hold 10,000 people,” Mao said in 1945, when he was still leading revolutionary forces from caves in rural China.
The Great Hall was built in less than a year starting in late 1958, during Mao’s fervent, and ultimately calamitous, Great Leap Forward: his attempt to rapidly industrialize China. By many scholars’ estimates, 20 million or more people died in the famine caused by Mao’s policies.
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