Hi AJ
in this post i would like to write about what happened with president xi visit to saudi. i see that you have some interest in this topic so i tried to pull this from our local news and from speeches of the leaders who participated.

1- who met president xi at airport? saudi arabia is divided into 13 areas/prefectures, each area is managed by a governor. when biden came he was met by Mekkah area governor (which include Jeddah) and saudi ambassador in US (she's a woman BTY). when xi came he was met by Riyadh area governor (which include capital city Riyadh) and ministry of foreign affairs.

2- why purple carpet and not red? saudi arabia decided 1 or 2 years ago to use the purple carpet to greet diplomatic guests (AKA the red carpet of saudi). the color was chosen because when spring comes and the deserts of saudi arabia rains it get green and purple flowers bloom everywhere. so the color was derived from saudi arabia nature. the purple carpet was used to greet biden and every leader visiting the country. for trump they used to red carpet since the visit was years ago before deciding to change colors.

3- for president xi visit they gave him the F-16 (not sure the model number) smoke show with chinese flag colors. Also when xi arrived at the royal castle he was greeted by MBS with handshake. Then they gave him a music show as a greeting. Not sure what this means in politics or diplomacy but it was more than they gave biden and less than trump.

so what happened during the leaders meeting? Three summits were conducted, Saudi-Chinese, Gulf-Chinese and Arab-Chinese summits. For Arab-Chinese summit around 30 Arab leaders attended.

In Saudi-Chinese summit, saudi arabia signed a $29 Billion worth of MOUs in the following fields (over 30 deals) .
1-cloud services with Huawei.
2-china to help saudi build around 100 thousand housing units (it is a very big number in saudi)
3-build nuclear power plant and train local engineers to operate it.
4-do something about teaching chinese language in saudi arabia.
5-improve supply chain in saudi to and include saudi arabia's red sea as part of belt and road project.
6-cooperation in space projects and china training saudi astronauts and sending them to the international space station.

Sorry that’s all I can remember.

For the other summits, I will summarize in the following from memory

1-xi said that china wants to secure oil and gas for very very long time and china will provide infrastructure and technology transfer to the region.

2-They also discussed about the issues in the regions and emphasized on taking care of them and external intervention should be stopped.

3-We should not intervene on each other internal affairs was mentioned by xi and many arab leaders.

4-xi mentioned Palestine and they should gain their rights of their territory and he supports the two states solutions and east Jerusalem to be Palestine capital (which many arab leaders support as well).

5- each leader gave a speech about their interest and their issues in the region.

That’s what I remember.

Press conference was held after the summits and I want to just mention 3 things about it.

1- saudi foreign minister was asked about selling oil in currency other than USD, and he answered that he doesn’t know about such thing and have nothing to add.

2-they did not discuss about security being provided by china, or china providing weapons to the region.

3-these summits were not a reaction or response to recent events or US democratic party taking over the white house. These summits were planned years ago but got delayed because of COVID.

These some of the topics mentioned in the summit and I will leave for analysis. Please let me know if you are interested more. All above points I got from our suadi local news