If the tech world had an All-Star Game, today’s Internet Forum at Microsoft could certainly qualify. 
 
 Top CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alibaba’s Jack Ma, and 23 other executives gathered today in Redmond, Wash., to meet with China President Xi Jinping at the conclusion of the eighth annual U.S.-China Internet Industry Forum. It was a rare gathering of some of the most powerful people in the tech industry who traveled from across the globe to Microsoft’s campus this week. 
 
 Before posing for a group picture and making a few remarks, the president and first lady Peng Liyuan joined Nadella, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Microsoft President Brad Smith, and others at the company’s executive building for a short tour that included technology demos of Microsoft products like the HoloLens and data visualization software. 
 
 President Xi then made his way to a large room to meet the CEOs, many of whom already spoke with China’s leader at a roundtable meeting earlier Wednesday. He went down the first line and shook hands with people like Zuckerberg, who spent 30 seconds delivering a message in Chinese to the president — the Facebook founder knows the language pretty well — before taking the podium for a quick speech. 
 
 “On a personal note, this was the first time I’ve ever spoken with a world leader entirely in a foreign language,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook, which is banned in China. “I consider that a meaningful personal milestone. It was an honor to meet President Xi and other leaders.” 
 
 “We are at Microsoft, while in the morning, I visited Boeing, which is hardware,” President Xi told the CEOs. “So, we’ve had both the hard things and the soft things.” 
 
 Presdient Xi, who is in the Seattle region this week meeting with business executives and government officials before heading to Washington D.C. to see President Obama, said he was impressed with the “beautiful campus of Microsoft.” He also noted that 2015 marked the 20th anniversary of cooperation between Microsoft and China. 
 
 “Microsoft products and the Windows operating system have shaped man’s cognition of computing technologies,” said the president, who was accompanied by a large delegation that included China’s “Internet czar” Lu Wei. 
 
 Unsurprisingly, President Xi touched on cybersecurity, a topic that’s caused tension between the U.S. and Chinese governments as of late with tech-related policies and technology protectionism. 
 
 “China advocates the building of a peaceful, secure, open, and cooperative cyberspace and believes that countries should formulate Internet-related public policies in line with their respective national realities,” he said. 
 
 The president noted that China has the world’s largest Internet market, while the U.S. boasts the “most-advanced Internet technologies.” 
 
 “The two sides should, on the basis of mutual respect, carry out constructive dialogue on cyber issues and forge a new highlight of China-U.S. cooperation so that cyberspace will provide more benefits to the people of both countries, as well as people of the whole world,” he said. 
 
 Here are the CEOs that attended, starting with the top row in this picture — any guesses at the net worth in this room? 
 
 Top row: Sugon CEO Li Jun; Didi-Kuaidi CEO Cheng Wei; Broadband Capital CEO Tian Suning; CEC CEO Liu Liehong; Baidu CEO Zhang Yaqin; AME Cloud Ventures CEO Jerry Yang; Inspur CEO Sun Pishu; Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky; Sequoia Capital China founder Shen Nanpeng. 
 
 Middle row: Sohu CEO Zhang Chaoyang; AMD CEO Lisa Su; Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing; Microsoft VP Harry Shum; Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf; CETC CEO Xiong Qunli; Intel CEO Brian Krzanich; Qihoo 360 CEO Zhou Hongyi; LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman; SINA CEO Cao Guowei. 
 
 Bottom row: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; JD.com CEO Liu Qiangdong; Cisco Chairman John Chambers; Alibaba founder Jack Ma; IBM CEO Ginni Rometty; President Xi; Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; China Minister Lu Wei; Apple CEO Tim Cook; Tencent CEO Pony Ma; Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. ||||| Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has gushed about his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, calling it a “personal milestone”, after he spoke in Mandarin to Xi at an event on Wednesday. 
 
 “On a personal note, this was the first time I’ve ever spoken with a world leader entirely in a foreign language,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page about the conversation that lasted less than a minute. “I consider that a meaningful personal milestone.” 
 
 A picture accompanying the post showed Zuckerberg greeting the president. He was in a suit and tie – a rare practice for the internet billionaire. Lu Wei – China’s internet tsar, who controls the country’s great firewall that blocks Facebook among other foreign websites – stood by the two, wearing a broad smile. 
 
 “It was an honour to meet President Xi and other leaders,” Zuckerberg’s post read, adding that internet users could follow updates of the president’s first state visit to the United States on the Facebook page “Xi’s US Visit”. 
 
 Zuckerberg met Xi when the president visited Microsoft’s main campus in Redmond, near Seattle, on Wednesday. A Microsoft spokeswoman said that during Xi’s meeting there with internet CEOs, the president spoke for only about six minutes and that none of the American business leaders responded. 
 
 Zuckerberg’s post about his brief chat with Xi sparked debate among internet users over China’s censorship. 
 
 “He has already banned your Facebook in China … Why did you meet him,” one user commented. 
 
 This is not the first time the Facebook founder has shown his admiration for the Chinese president. When he welcomed Lu Wei on a visit to his company’s headquarters in December, press photos showed a copy of The Governance of China – a collection of Xi’s speeches – on Zuckerberg’s desk. 
 
 The gesture, interpreted as Zuckerberg’s effort to court the Chinese government, disappointed and angered activists in China, who had held the social network in high regard for sharing information beyond the tight controls of the country’s ruling Communist Party, the Associated Press reported. 
 
 ”Mr Zuckerberg is either ignorant of China’s politics or shameless,” said prominent dissident Hu Jia, who called Lu a top enemy of internet freedom and expressed worry that technology giants such as Facebook were kowtowing to Beijing for their own business interests. “He is an internet genius who should understand the power of technology for social change.” 
 
 Asked in November about Facebook’s blockage in China, Lu said: “The bottom line for foreign internet companies to enter China is they obey Chinese laws and regulations.” 
 
 They should not harm the country’s national interest and the interest of Chinese consumers, the top internet regulator added. ||||| 点击查看本文中文版 
 
 After his appearances at the United Nations and a six-day, cross-country journey, President Xi Jinping headed home on Monday. 
 
 Looking back at the trip, the most memorable moment – and maybe the most important – was watching $2.5 trillion of American corporate power pay homage to the Chinese president. 
 
 That event unfolded in a less than obvious way. 
 
 When word circulated that the chief executives of the top American technology companies would meet with Mr. Xi for a group photo on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., last week, many wondered who would turn up. 
 
 The photo was scheduled for the end of an Internet industry conference that the Chinese had choreographed for Mr. Xi’s trip to try to smooth over the deep problems many American tech companies face in the China market, including rampant theft of intellectual property. 
 
 For days, reporters had asked Microsoft, a co-host of the conference with China, for the names of the executive who would meet Mr. Xi. Microsoft demurred. 
 
 The turnout at the opening session of the conference was desultory. Perhaps, it seemed, there would just be a handful of executives with Mr. Xi. 
 
 In the afternoon, about 20 minutes before Mr. Xi was scheduled to arrive, his Internet czar, Lu Wei, entered the room where risers had been set up for the executives. Mr. Lu checked where Mr. Xi would stand, looked around the room, and left. 
 
 Suddenly, the chief executives of America’s top 10 technology companies – market value about $2.5 trillion – accompanied by the heads of more than a dozen Chinese tech companies, arrived. They lined up in three rows. 
 
 These executives are not accustomed to being beckoned – they turn down invitations to business summits, the World Economic Forum and more. But Mr. Xi beckoned, and they came. 
 
 The allure of being in Mr. Xi’s orbit was clearly too tantalizing for the executives to miss. 
 
 After they arrived, the executives cooled their heels for more than 10 minutes, waiting for Mr. Xi to finish his tour of Microsoft. 
 
 It was hard to imagine these execs waiting idly for 10 minutes anywhere else. 
 
 Mr. Xi eventually entered, smiled and shook hands with the first row, starting with Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, which is banned in China. 
 
 For the photo, Mr. Xi planted himself next to Virginia M. Rometty, the head of IBM. A podium was rolled out, and Mr. Xi spoke for about six minutes, then left. 
 
 That photo op turned out to be the most sensational moment of the trip, a 10-minute session that illustrated the raw power of the Chinese leader and the huge market he controls. 
 
 Afterward, even Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, said he was impressed. “Did you feel the room shake?” he said, with a smile. ||||| Chinese president Xi Jinping got a warm welcome from tech leaders Wednesday (Sept. 23) for his US tour. Some of the biggest names in tech—including Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg—met with the president for a discussion held in Seattle, where Xi is having a series of high-level meetings. 
 
 To commemorate the occasion, the invited attendees—US and Chinese CEOs spanning multiple industries—posed for what can be described as an awkward class photo of super powerful people. 
 
 Seattle Times reporter Matt Day tweeted the following image, taken at Microsoft’s headquarters (that’s one way to get Cook to step foot into Microsoft’s HQ). 
 
 In addition to Cook, Bezos, and Zuckerberg (who apparently does own a suit), some of the notable tech leaders in the photo include:
– One way to get the head of Apple to visit the Microsoft campus: Tell him it's picture day with the president of China. Tim Cook and other technology bigwigs—including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Alibaba's Jack Ma—gathered yesterday in Redmond, Wash., for a meeting with Xi Jinping, who's in the US on his first state visit, reports Quartz. While they were there, Xi and the group of 29 high-level US and Chinese tech execs posed for what the site calls "an awkward class photo of super powerful people" that showed, more or less, what it would look like if "the tech world had an All-Star Game," as GeekWire puts it. After touring Microsoft's executive building with Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella and watching high-tech demos, Xi smiled for the camera with the others. Zuckerberg (who Quartz points out does, indeed, own a suit) greeted Xi by speaking to him briefly in Mandarin, the South China Morning Post reports. "On a personal note, this was the first time I've ever spoken with a world leader entirely in a foreign language," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. "I consider that a meaningful personal milestone. It was an honor to meet President Xi and other leaders." One of those leaders was Lu Wei, the Chinese Internet chief responsible for setting up the country's firewall and keeping Zuckerberg's site out—a point not lost on commenters to Zuckerberg's post. "He banned Facebook in China. He doesn't deserve to meet u man," wrote one.