Last month, US and many international news outlets ran a number of headlines about the 2016 G20 Summit meeting held in China. But ironically, the Summit drew attention not for what it did accomplish, but more for what it did not. And an undercurrent of tension and drama between the US and China surfaced in several conspicuous ways. But to understand what went down, it is important to get an idea of what the G20 is all about.

The Group of Twenty (G20) is a union of twenty of the world’s major and developing economies. Leaders of these twenty member states meet every year at the G20 Summit meeting to decide global economic and fiscal policy and promote cooperation on such matters that affect many countries. Chief among the twenty members of the G20 are the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Russia, China, Japan, India, and Australia. The G20’s twenty members collectively represent two-thirds of the world’s total population and 85 percent of its GDP.

The privilege of hosting the G20 Summit rotates each year. The host country picks the city in which it will be held, and also has the right to extend an invitation to any non-member country it chooses. The head of state of the host country decides the agenda of the Summit and is recognized as chair of the proceedings.

This year for the first time, China was granted the honor of hosting the G20 Summit, only the second time an Asian country has ever done so. The Summit took place in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province in eastern China.

The G20 Summit was widely hailed as a milestone for China, a symbol of its development as a budding world leader. From the outset China felt the pressure to make its mark this year as it has never done before. Afterwards, President Jinping described the Summit as “a great success,” and there are few who doubt that he intended it to be anything else.

Hangzhou, for example, underwent a complete makeover before the Summit. The Chinese government spent billions on new highways and three-story homes near the International Expo Center, the venue for the Summit. Constructed exclusively for the event, the Center cost the equivalent of a staggering $1.2 billion.

But Xi Jinping went even further. In the weeks leading up to the Summit, the government took a series of steps to purify Hangzhou before welcoming its foreign visitors. Half the cars were forced off the roads in an effort to rein in pollution. More than 225 factories and building sites in the vicinity were shut down, driving thousands of migrant workers out of the city whose population usually numbers upwards of 9 million.

The government even declared a week-long public holiday, ordering all shops and businesses closed. Anyone who resisted, writes Tom Phillips for The Guardian, was either placed under house arrest or expelled from the city. The result has been described as a “mass exodus” from the city. Foreign journalists spent days combing Hangzhou’s deserted backstreets for interviewees, trailed by vigilant Chinese security. The usually bustling metropolis, according to the UK Times’ Sam Coates, was a veritable “ghost town.”

But perhaps the largest headline from the 2016 Summit occurred at the Hangzhou International Airport. After Air Force One touched down on September 3, a heated dispute occurred between US and Chinese airport officials about how US President Barack Obama would disembark from his plane. The Chinese refused to allow Mr. Obama to walk down his plane’s own set of rolling stairs, while neglecting to provide a substitute stairway. The President ended up coming out through a small door low in the fuselage that is usually reserved for low-profile access in countries with high security concerns, like Afghanistan.

The conflict escalated as one particular Chinese agent loudly accosted White House staff about where the US press could stand on the tarmac. According to Mark Landler of the New York Times, the same official yelled over and over in Chinese, “This is our country! This is our airport!” A lengthy “shouting match” followed that was eventually broken up when the aggressive Chinese staffer was pulled aside by another Chinese official, who pointed out that reporters were watching everything.

“These things do not happen by mistake, not with the Chinese,” remarks Jorge Guajardo, former Mexican ambassador to China. “It’s a snub. It’s Xi Jinping playing the nationalist card.”

American journalist Bill Bishop puts it a little differently: “It’s their way of saying, ‘Look, we can make the American president go out of the ass of the airplane.” Bishop sums up the world’s general impression of the incident: that the Chinese were trying really hard to prove that they could stand up to the US and not be pushovers.

The Chinese, for their part, denied that the fiasco with the stairs was intentional and instead blamed the “arrogance and conceitedness” of Western media outlets.

Mr. Obama himself stressed that the events should not affect the broader scope of US-China relations. But, he admitted, “this time the seams were showing a little more than usual.”

The predictable result of all this chaos is that the actual progress made by the 2016 G20 Summit was overshadowed by the spectacle put on by the Chinese in Hangzhou. That is not to say that there was no progress made at the Summit; there certainly was. Specifically, G20 leaders made headway in negotiations of the WTO’s Environmental Goods Agreement; adopted a two-year G20 Action Plan to combat corruption, illicit finance, tax evasion, and money laundering; and the US and China joined the Paris Agreement, bringing its full realization within reach.

However, the ceremonious close of the 2016 G20 Summit left some world leaders with the impression that they had not made much concrete headway. To the press, at least, the Hangzhou Summit seemed to be characterized more by hollow assertions and political theatrics–or, as The Guardian’s Caitlyn Byrne puts it, “big on show but short on substance.” It would seem that despite all of Xi Jinping’s posturing and diplomatic muscle-flexing, he missed his chance to truly prove himself and his country.