The two will enact a kind of “shadow play,” in which they put on a show of friendship while subplots develop offstage. Their discussion will focus partly on cooperation on joint infrastructure projects in third-party countries but this will require imaginative acting if backstage feuds are to remain concealed.

Much of the discussion in Beijing centred on the allegation that the initiative is China’s pursuit of “debt trap diplomacy,” as a cover to secure control over infrastructure assets including ports and motorways across and beyond Eurasia.

But this issue is a sideshow compared to the real issues at stake in the new Great Game of the plan. The infrastructure programme “could become to Asia what ancient Rome was to Europe,” said Amar Bhattacharya, a senior fellow at the Global Economy and Development Programme at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, on the eve of the Beijing forum.

That’s precisely what the United States and its strategic ally Japan wish to avoid. Just as all roads led to Rome at the time of the Roman Empire, so all roads (and sea lanes) could one day lead to Beijing. They will come not only from Asia but also from Europe, Africa and even Latin America, if the belt and road plan continues to spread physical connectivity, strategic reach and soft power diplomacy from China.

At least that’s how hawks in the Donald Trump’s administration see things, and such views are not a million miles away from those in certain echelons of the Abe government in Tokyo.

That’s why Xi and Abe are going to have to perform a delicate duet, or pirouette, when the Chinese leader comes to Japan for one of his rare visits.

Both leaders are anxious to hedge against ruptures in their economic relations with the US - real in the case of China which has been taking considerable flak in the Trump trade wars, and potential in the case of Japan which is just entering trade combat with Washington. To that extent, the Xi and Abe camps need to mend fences and make nice to each other.

Such is the history of mutual antagonism between Japan and China - interspersed with occasional brief periods of rapprochement - that the bilateral meetings in Japan are likely to have teeth-grinding moments, even if Abe and Xi do manage something better than a limp handshake and sickly smiles this time.

All this is generating spectacular infrastructure business that Japanese firms would like to be involved in, yet Abe remains highly guarded in his relations with China. The prospect of Sino-Japan joint infrastructure projects in third-party countries appeared to offer a way around the dilemma, but is nevertheless something of a mine-strewn diversion.

Abe is anxious to push his “quality infrastructure” concept as an alternative to China’s implicit lower-quality projects. Aside from the fact that belt and road plan clients are as much, if not more, cost conscious than quality conscious, Japan’s demand to be involved in projects from their inception instead of being a supplier, may be hard for China to stomach.

Such issues are negotiable, but the backstage sub plot - Tokyo is working on an alternative to the belt and road scheme - is the bigger stumbling block to any Abe-Xi agreement.

Competition can be healthy, said Brookings’ Bhattacharya, a former World Bank and G24 official. But in the case of the belt and road plan versus the rest, the name of the game is not just economic competition, but a struggle for strategic advantage among some of the world’s great powers.

Maybe the Beijing forum and the upcoming G20 summit are the real sideshows while the true plot is evolving offstage.

Anthony Rowley is a veteran journalist specialising in Asian economic and financial affairs