Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping’s rare trip abroad featured an important discussion with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but the high-profile encounter gave way to a dispute about which side asked for the meeting.

“President Xi Jinping talked with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit at the latter’s request on August 23, 2023,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a summary of the meeting.

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Indian officials hastened to contradict that claim. “There was a pending request from the Chinese side for a bilateral meeting,” an anonymous official told local media. Those officials added that Modi granted only an “informal conversation” with his communist counterpart.

“They're trying on the one hand, to at the very least, tone down differences with various actors, including the United States, India, Japan, and Europe,” an analyst from India said. “They’re very intent on doing this in a manner in which they save face. ... They’re trying very hard to show that ‘it’s not China that wants to cool the temperature, it’s actually everybody else.’”

That particular controversy capped a weird week of high-level diplomacy for Xi, who left China for just the second time this year for the BRICS summit in South Africa. China and Russia regard the expanding bloc as a potential means to challenge the international order underpinned by the United States, but the pageantry of the week was marred by a series of public missteps by Xi’s prestige-minded regime, including his last-minute decision to skip his first scheduled speech of the week.

“There may be some challenges at the top of the hierarchy because the foreign ministry is just not able to do protocol as well as it has in the past,” said Dr. Carla Freeman, a China expert at the United States Institute of Peace. “The question of what caused [Xi] to miss delivering that speech is really interesting.”

It’s a question without any obvious answers forthcoming from a communist system whose opacity was demonstrated most recently by the unexplained disappearance and then replacement of erstwhile Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang. In Xi’s absence, the task of addressing the BRICS business forum fell to Chinese Commerce Secretary Wang Wentao, who filled in by reading the text that Xi had intended to be a tone-setting denunciation of the United States.

Xi’s absence from the opening session could feed into persistent speculation that he has health problems. “There have been speculations that he's not looking so good,” Pacific Forum senior fellow Akhil Ramesh told the Washington Examiner. “There was a lot of speculation, but, at this stage, we don't know for sure if it’s health or if there's something else going on.”

The second day of the summit offered Xi a chance to make an imposing entrance to the center of the geopolitical stage, but there too his team ran into an unsought obstruction. As Xi walked down the red carpet into the plenary session of the meeting in Johannesburg, an aide scrambled to follow — only to be manhandled by event security, which restrained the man and closed the door, in full view of television cameras that caught Xi’s confusion and broadcast it around the world.

“This is really the first time he's been photographed in the past few weeks,” Freeman said. “I have a feeling somebody's head will roll as a result of that snafu.”

The series of flaps could point to a simpler explanation, according to Freeman, who noted that Qin’s absence has forced the communist regime’s top foreign policy official, former Foreign Minister Wang Yi, to take over duties.

“The big question for me is, how effectively is China's Foreign Ministry performing, given the absence of a dedicated foreign minister,” she said. “It's not clear that Wang Yi, with his greater influence on policy decision-making, that he has that bandwidth. And I think we're seeing some errors in protocol.”

Xi nonetheless presided over an agreement to invite Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two key U.S. allies in the Middle East, to join the BRICS bloc. Xi also attended the China-Africa Leaders’ Dialogue and spoke with Modi — an important relationship to manage, given the Indian prime minister’s status as the head of the world’s largest democracy, a growing partner with the United States, and the leader of a country in a fractious border dispute with China.

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In short, there are several reasons for Xi to regard the trip “as a success,” in Freeman's view — if he can get past the petty embarrassments.

“It goes back to the basics: If you're a nationalist leader, you want to be seen as a strong one; no one will accept a weak leader,” Ramesh said. “They want to be seen as top dog. They don’t want to be the one being manhandled by South Africa.”