President Donald Trump, who posted to social media at a near live-broadcast pace during his first trip to China nine years ago, appears to be refraining from social media activity for the U.S.-China summit held on the 14th.

As of 6:40 p.m. that day, Trump’s social media ‘Truth Social’ features two videos: a 30-second clip of him departing in a protocol vehicle moments after arriving in China the previous day, and another showing him attending a welcome ceremony with Chinese President Xi Jinping in front of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on the day of the summit.

During his 2017 tour of Asia, Trump essentially live-tweeted his every move on Twitter (now X). On November 8, as he headed to China after visiting South Korea, he posted a total of eight tweets, four of which went up immediately upon his arrival in Beijing. On the 9th, when the summit was held, he posted four tweets in total, and even just before leaving China he posted one more.

At the time, access to Twitter in China was blocked due to the influence of the so-called ‘Great Firewall’, the country’s internet censorship apparatus. Even the Great Firewall, however, could not stop Trump’s tweets: shortly after arriving in China, after visiting the Forbidden City at President Xi’s invitation, he posted photos along with the message, “An unforgettable afternoon and evening at Beijing’s Forbidden Citythank you to President Xi and Madame Peng Liyuan,” adding, “Looking forward to seeing you again tomorrow morning.”

As Trump continued to post on Twitter by circumventing China’s censorship, speculation arose that ‘the White House must have deployed special equipment to bypass the firewall’, and that ‘Chinese authorities may have opened the firewall as a courtesy to the president’.

Trump’s current platform, ‘Truth Social’, is also reportedly blocked in China, and users in the country are said to need to circumvent the block using a VPN (virtual private network) to access it.